Hamas warns West Bank to be next area of confrontation with Israel
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has warned that the occupied West Bank will be the next area for the confrontation between the resistance and Israeli regime.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ Political Bureau and a former Palestinian minister, who has served several portfolios, made the remarks to the Middle East Eye news and analysis website on Saturday.
“We believe that the main confrontation will be in the West Bank not in Gaza Strip because again the Israeli regime is considering the West Bank, including [the holy occupied city of] al-Quds, to be strategically the next goal of its annexation,” he said.
The regime occupied the West Bank, including al-Quds, the eastern part of which Palestinians seek as the capital of their future state, during a heavily-Western-backed war in 1967.
Afterwards, it proceeded to set up several hundreds of illegal settlements in the territory, and create insufferable impediments to the Palestinian freedom of movement there amid continued Western backing, including by the United States, the regime’s biggest ally.
Naim’s remarks came around a week after the regime was forced to approve of a ceasefire deal with Hamas that is expected to end Tel Aviv’s 15-month-long war of genocide against Gaza that has claimed the lives of at least 47,000 Palestinians.
Now, the movement warns that Tel Aviv, which had ramped up its deadly aggression across the West Bank during the war too, could be turning the occupied territory into its next central battlefield against the Palestinian nation.
Naim, meanwhile, asserted that the Palestinian resistance would not settler for the option of living under occupation amid the regime’s deadly attacks.
“We cannot fight to improve the conditions of a prison. We are looking to get rid of the prison itself,” he said.
“If the Palestinians cannot reach their goal of an independent state, including Gaza Strip and the West Bank and al-Quds, no one can enjoy security or stability or prosperity in the region,” Naim warned.
The official also hailed the Palestinian resistance’s causing the Israeli regime to stop short of achieving all of the goals it had sought to achieve throughout the war on Gaza.