Gaza :Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a speech marking the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, said Israel was acting like a “rabid dog” and “a wild wolf” in acts that amounted to a human catastrophe in Gaza and which must be resisted.
“A people surrounded in a small place with closed borders, unsure of having water and electricity, this population faces an armed enemy,” he said “The people resist unabated. This is a lesson for all.”
“The US president issued a fatwa that the resistance is disarmed so that they cannot respond to all those crimes (committed by Israel),” the supreme leader said, referring to a call by Barack Obama for the “disarmament of terrorist groups and the demilitarization of Gaza”.
“We say the opposite. The world and especially the Islamic world should arm … the Palestinian people,” Khamenei said.
His comments came after rallies in support of Palestinians were held across Iran on Friday
There was no hope for swift end to the 22 day old campaign as Israel’s military pounded targets in the Gaza Strip on Monday night, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country needed to be prepared for a long conflict in the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli aircraft targeted the house of a Hamas Leader on Tuesday before dawn. There were no casualties, but severe damage. Monday night was a night of attacks as Eleven people were killed in a strike on a house in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza City. 10 Military personnel died in the fighting on Monday.
Nearly 1,087 Gazans, most of them civilians, have died in the 22-day-old conflagration, 53 Israeli soldiers have also been killed, while three Israeli civilians have died as a result of Palestinian shelling. The explosion of violence, after a day of relative calm on Sunday, appeared to wreck international hopes of turning a brief lull into a longer-term ceasefire
In a televised address on Monday night, a grim-faced Netanyahu said any solution to the crisis would require the demilitarization of the Palestinian territory, controlled by Hamas Islamists and their militant allies.
“We will not finish the mission, we will not finish the operation without neutralising the tunnels, which have the sole purpose of destroying our citizens, killing our children,” Netanyahu said, adding that it had been a “painful day”.
An opinion poll broadcast by Israel’s Channel 10 television showed overwhelming public support for continuing the Gaza offensive until Hamas is “disarmed.
International pressure
Foreign pressure has been building on Netanyahu to muzzle his forces. Both US President Barack Obama and the UN Security Council called for an immediate ceasefire to allow relief to reach Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians, followed by negotiations on a more durable cessation of hostilities.
Israel wants guarantees Hamas will be stripped of its tunnels and rocket stocks. It is worried that the Palestinian Islamists will parlay the truce talks mediated by their friends in Qatar and Turkey into an easing of an Israeli-Egypt blockade on Gaza.
