Chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Gen. Hossein Salami speaks at a pro-government rally in Tehran, Iran, on November 25, 2019. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commander on Wednesday hailed the Palestinian terrorists who have battered Israel with rocket fire in the Gaza Strip’s latest conflict.
“Today we are witnessing the birth of a new Palestine… fighting with missiles,” Major General Hossein Salami said at a pro-Palestinian rally in central Tehran’s Imam Hossein Square.
“A new Israel has also emerged, one that is broken, frustrated, downcast, that has lost confidence in itself,” said Salami, whose country supports the Islamist terror groups in Gaza firing rockets at Israel.
The general, who heads the ideological arm of Iran’s military, said the suspension last week of international flights to Israel’s Tel Aviv airport because of rocket fire was “a first.”
“The battle for Palestine is not only one of the Palestinians against the Israelis,” he said, but one that “symbolizes the battle of Muslims against world arrogance,” the Islamic Republic’s term for the West.
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Hamas rockets light up the night sky as they are fired towards Israel from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 14, 2021, while Israeli Iron Dome interceptors rise to meet them. (MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
Palestinian terror groups in Gaza have fired over 3,000 rockets at Israel since last Monday. Twelve people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, have been killed in the rocket fire, and hundreds have been injured.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, at least 219 Palestinians have been killed so far in the nine days of the conflict, including more than 60 children. It was not immediately clear if this ministry tally included all of those killed or if there were Hamas operatives not included in the count.
According to the IDF, more than 120 of those killed were members of Hamas and over 25 were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as of Monday night. The IDF says some of the Gaza civilian fatalities were killed by the terror groups’ own rockets, falling short and exploding in Gaza.
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