Video – Hamas, Islamic Jihad call for popular uprising after deadly Israeli settler attack on West Bank village

Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have condemned an attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the village of Jit in the northern West Bank, killing a Palestinian and setting fire to other residents’ homes and cars.

In a statement on Friday, Hamas called for a popular uprising against the settler gangs.

“We mourn the heroic martyr Rashid Mahmoud Sada, who was killed by settler militias in the village of Jit. We affirm that this pure blood will not be in vain and will be a curse for the occupying regime,” the statement said.

Earlier, Abdel Rahman Shadid, a Hamas leader, had stated that “the aggression of the Nazi occupation through its armed illegal settlers in the village of Jit east of Qalqilya tonight, along with the arson and abuse, is part of a series of crimes by the occupation in the West Bank.”

Shadid called on Palestinians in the West Bank to “continue to resist the occupation and the settlers and their brutal attacks by all means possible.”

The Islamic Jihad resistance movement, in turn, condemned the attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the village of Jit, calling it a declaration of war on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

“The siege of the village by the occupying army during the attack is reminiscent of the massacres carried out by the Stern, Irgun and Haganah gangs, among others, in 1948, with the aim of driving our people from their land.

“The occupation army’s participation in securing protection against these crimes proves that what is being carried out is an official plan under the sponsorship of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Gaza-based group said in a statement.

The Islamic Jihad Movement called on all Palestinian residents of the West Bank to confront settler gangs and their crimes in defense of the occupied territories and the Palestinian nation.

Furthermore, the Palestinian Mujahideen movement condemned the attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the Palestinian village of Jit as an extension of the genocidal war that the fascist Zionist entity is waging against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

“This brutal aggression, supported by the criminals (Israel’s so-called National Security Minister Itamar) Ben-Gvir and (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, in which settlers besieged the village, set fire to properties and shot at unarmed civilians, represents a dangerous escalation in Zionist aggression against our people. It must be met with a qualitative escalation in resistance and confrontation,” the statement said.

“We call on the masses of our people in the cities and towns of the West Bank to a large-scale uprising and an extensive intifada to firmly confront the crimes of the Zionists and thwart their criminal plans aimed at the eradication of the Palestinian presence and the expulsion of our people,” it added.

On Thursday evening, more than 100 illegal Israeli settlers attacked Jit, killing one Palestinian civilian and seriously wounding another.

During the raid, they set fire to four houses and six vehicles belonging to Palestinians.

Since Israel launched a war in the besieged Gaza Strip in early October 2023, casualties in the West Bank have increased as a result of intensified, almost daily Israeli attacks on towns and cities in the occupied territories.

At least 623 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 5,400 others wounded by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the war in Gaza broke out, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

At least 40,005 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have also been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip over the past 10 months.