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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Resistance vows vengeance for death of their leaders!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

Arab resistance movements have vowed to avenge the deaths of their leaders in Beirut and Tehran this week.

Fuad Shukar, a senior commander in the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, was killed in Beirut during an Israeli air-raid on Tuesday. The head of the Hamas politburo, Ismail Haniyeh, died a few hours later when an Israeli missile slammed into his residence in Tehran. Haniyeh had gone to Tehran the day before to participate in the inauguration ceremony of Masoud Pezeshkian, the new President of the Islamic Republic.

The Israelis say Shukar’s assassination was in response to an alleged Hezbollah strike in the occupied Golan Heights, which the Lebanese resistance movement say they didn’t do, but they have still to admit openly to killing the Hamas leader.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says Israel will be “severely punished” for the killing of Haniyeh on Iranian soil as senior Iranian officials held talks with their allies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen to discuss the next step in the confrontation with the Zionist entity.

Russia and People’s China condemned what the Russians called the “cynical murder” of the Hamas political chief who had played a key role in negotiations to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip. And at UN headquarters in New York the Syrian delegate told the Security Council that “the events over the past few days’ highlight that the Israeli war criminals have decided to continue their bloody attacks to plunge the region into a full-scale war, benefiting from unlimited US support at the expense of international peace and security and the lives and blood of innocent people”.

Qusai al Dahhak warned that Israel’s continued disregard of international laws and its failure to comply with the resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly may lead to igniting the entire region and threatening regional and international peace and security.

The Israeli war criminals would not have continued to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity if it were not for the unlimited support of the USA and the hypocrisy and double standards practised by some Western countries that are involved in the Israeli war against the Palestinian people and have remained silent on the matter.

Tens of thousands took to the streets of the Iranian capital to pay their last respects to the Palestinian leader at his funeral ceremony on Thursday. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led prayers for the Hamas leader, whose body will be buried in Qatar, while the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said “the assassination of the resistance commanders in Lebanon and Tehran is an indication of the weakness of the Zionist regime… these crimes will not affect the path of our movement”.

The American foreign minister, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, says the USA “was not aware of or involved in” the killing of Haniyeh, but many Arabs suspect that the Israelis were secretly given the go-ahead by the Americans when Netanyahu was in Washington last week.

Now the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu boasts that he has “not surrendered to the public pressure to end the war up until now and does not intend to”, while the communists warn of the imminent danger of another all-out war in the Middle East.

The Communist Party of Israel and the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) said: “The Israeli settler government is knowingly flaming a regional war that will hurt all peoples of the region, including Israeli citizens. These assassinations give cover to the Israeli government failure to reach the war’s objectives and eliminate any chance to reach a deal that will end the war, free the hostages and prisoners, reconstruct Gaza and enable the residents of northern and southern Israel to return to their homes…these are assassinations against diplomacy itself by a trigger-happy government that can only speak the language of violence and destruction”.