to report «iusnews»; A spokesman for the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement dismissed Israel’s alleged ground advances in its war of aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip.
“The [Israeli] enemy is depicting a false picture of its attempts to penetrate our land,” Abu Hamza, who speaks for the Al-Quds Brigades, said in a video statement on Monday, presstv reported.
He added that Palestinian resistance fighters have inflicted heavy losses on the Israeli forces in many areas.
Abu Hamza emphasized that all Palestinian resistance factions “continue to confront the miserable ground maneuvers carried out by the enemy’s army in an attempt to restore confidence” among its forces.
He added that Israeli forces were in fact lured into “ambushes of terror and death” in Gaza.
His remarks came after earlier on Monday, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas said Israeli tanks that had advanced near Gaza were forced to retreat after heavy clashes.
“There’s absolutely no ground advance inside the residential neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip. What happened on Salah Al-Din Street was the incursion of a few occupation army tanks and a bulldozer,” said Salama Maarouf, the head of the Hamas office in Gaza.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the spokesman for Al-Quds Brigades said, “The results of Operation Al-Aqsa Storm have appeared clearly on the enemy’s internal scene”, adding that the battle will witness a shift in favor of the resistance at all levels".
Abu Hamza also addressed the families of Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, saying, “Your leadership is risking your children in order to buy time”.
The spokesman warned, “Every minute that passes poses a threat to the lives of captives held by the resistance amid the barbaric bombardment of Gaza.”
He added that some of the captives have already lost their lives in Israel’s indiscriminate strikes.
Abu Hamza emphasized that Palestinian resistance movements will not allow Israel to exploit negotiations on the release of captives to achieve its goals.
The Islamic Jihad also stressed that the Palestinian resistance would press ahead with its efforts to thwart Israel’s plots and confront its aggression.
“The resistance has been steadfast in this field and continues its struggle and can neutralize the plans and goals of the enemy,” the statement said, adding, “During this infiltration, the enemy received blows from the resistance.”
On Monday, local media said the regime’s tanks made an incursion towards Salah Al-Din Street, in the middle of the Gaza City, and also cut a key road from the North to the South of the coastal silver, touching off heavy clashes between the Israeli occupation forces and Palestinians resistance groups.
Reports added that the clashes took more than one hour and “plumes of smoke” could be seen rising over the area where the tanks had been stranded.
Salama Maarouf, the head of the Media Office in Gaza, also dismissed any reports of Israeli advance on the besieged area and said the Israeli tanks had retreated from the outskirts of Gaza City.
“There’s absolutely no ground advance inside the residential neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip. What happened on Salah al-Din Street was the incursion of a few occupation army tanks and a bulldozer,” Maarouf said in a statement.
“These vehicles targeted two civilian cars on Salah Al-Din Street and bulldozed the street before the resistance forced them to retreat. There is currently no presence of occupation army vehicles on Salah Al-Din Road, and citizen movement has returned to normal on the road,” he said.
Media reports underlined that the tanks stayed for just over an hour and cars soon returned to the highway, driving onto the verge in the parts where craters had made the road unusable.
The regime in Tel Aviv announced the start of a ground incursion into the besieged Gaza Strip late on Friday.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Tel Aviv has also blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into a humanitarian crisis.
The regime has further ordered 1.1 million people in the North of Gaza to evacuate and move south of the coastal sliver. However, it has continued to rain down bombs on the South.
According to the health ministry in Gaza, 8,306 Palestinians have been killed, including 3,457 children, in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7.
