Hamas, Islamic Jihad call for popular uprising after deadly Israeli settler attack on West Bank village Friday, August 16, 2024 10:59 AM Hundreds of Israeli settlers armed with assault rifles and Molotov cocktails are attacking the Palestinian village of Jit, east of Qalqilia in the West Bank. 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, where they killed a Palestinian and set fire to the homes and cars of other residents. 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 occupation regime,” the statement said. Earlier, Hamas leader Abdel Rahman Shadid had said that “the aggression of the Nazi occupation through its armed illegal settlers on the village of Jit east of Qalqilya tonight, along with the arson and beatings, 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 rise up against the occupation and its settlers and to confront their brutal attacks by all means.” The resistance movement Islamic Jihad, for its part, also 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 occupation army’s siege of the village during the attack is reminiscent of the massacres committed in 1948 by the Stern, Irgun and Haganah gangs, among others, with the aim of driving our people from their homes. “The participation of the occupation army to obtain protection from 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 also urged all Palestinian residents of the West Bank to confront settler gangs and their crimes in defense of the occupied territories and the Palestinian nation. In addition, the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement condemned the attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the Palestinian village of Jit as an extension of the genocidal war led by the fascist Zionist entity 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,” it said in a statement. “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 night, more than 100 illegal Israeli settlers attacked Jit, killing one Palestinian civilian and seriously wounding another. They set fire to four houses and six vehicles belonging to Palestinians during the raid. Since Israel launched a war in the besieged Gaza Strip in early October 2023, the number of casualties in the West Bank has risen as Israel intensifies its near-daily raids on towns and cities in the occupied territories. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 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. An additional 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.