Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza on Saturday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Hamas terrorist group.
Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal is expected to speak at the central rally taking place in Gaza City. Mashaal entered the Strip on Friday, for the first time ever and after a long exile from Palestinian territory.
Thousands of Hamas supporters, some of them flashing victory signs, were braving the rain to attend the event. Some parents brought children dressed in military uniforms.
Palestinian sources reported that the terror organization’s supporters from throughout the region had arrived in Gaza to participate in the festivities.
A spokesmen for Hamas’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, warned Israelis to prepare their passports.
“We fought the Zionist entity with limited power,” he said. “What will happen when we fight with all our might?
“Zionists, you should prepare your passports and get ready to disappear,” the spokesman added.
In a special message released in honor of the anniversary, Hamas leaders vowed to continue the path of resistance and jihad “to liberate Palestine.”
“The great crimes perpetrated against us by the Zionist occupation only fuel our desire to resist and fight,” read the message.
Two Iranian warships docked in Port Sudan for the second time in less than two months in recent days, angering Saudi Arabia, which provides crucial aid money to the African nation.
The stated purpose of the visit was to refuel the Iranian vessels, whose presence in Sudan is part of the military cooperation between the two nations, according to a Sudanese military spokesman.
In October, the Islamic Republic sent two navy ships to Port Sudan just days after an attack on a munitions factory near Khartoum. Sudan blamed Israel for that attack.
Israeli officials did not respond to the accusations but rather blamed Sudan for providing aid to Hamas terrorists in Gaza, in part by smuggling Iranian weapons into the Strip.
Israel charges that Iran provides Gazan terrorist groups with weapons, including rockets, via Sudan. The weapons are smuggled across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and into the Gaza Strip through a network of smuggling tunnels under the 15-kilometer border.
Sudan’s Vice President Al-Haj Adam Youssef said in November that his country is not intimidated by “Israeli aggression” and that it wouldcontinue to support Hamas.
Thousands of Gazans gathered Saturday to to mark Hamas's founding and celebrate its "victory" over Israel.
Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who attended the rally, set his sights on "liberating Palestine" upon his arrival in the Gaza Strip on Friday, his first-ever visit to the Palestinian enclave.
Laying out his hopes for future triumphant visits, Mashaal told cheering crowds, "Today is Gaza. Tomorrow will be Ramallah and after that Jerusalem, then Haifa and Jaffa," Ma'an News Agency reported.
According to the report, Mashaal referred to the Gaza visit as his "third birth"; his second birth, he said, was surviving an Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997.
"I pray to God that my fourth birth will come the day we liberate Palestine," he added.
Hours after NATO agreed on Tuesday to send Patriot missiles to Turkey because of the crisis in Syria, Russia delivered its first shipment of Iskander missiles to Syria.
The superior Iskander can travel at hypersonic speed of over 1.3 miles per second (Mach 6-7) and has a range of over 280 miles with pinpoint accuracy of destroying targets with its 1,500-pound warhead, a nightmare for any missile defense system.
Reporting today, Mashregh said the handover occurred when Russian naval logistic vessels docked at Tartus in Syria.
The Iskandar is a surface-to-surface missile that no missile defense system can trace or destroy, Mashregh said. Russia had earlier threatened that should America put its missile defense system in Poland, it would retaliate by placing its Iskander missiles at Kaliningrad, its Baltic Sea port.
Russia’s delivery of Iskanders to Bashar Assad’s embattled regime clearly shows that the security and stability of Syria remains Russia’s red line, Mashregh said. It is unknown how many of these missiles have been delivered but the numbers given are sufficient to destroy any Patriot missiles
As reported in a WND exclusive on Dec. 5, Iran’s Islamic regime also sees the toppling of the Assad regime as its red line and has 170 ballistic missiles targeting Tel Aviv in underground missile silos, some with biological warheads.
In August, a commentary in Mashregh, representing the regime’s views, warned America and Israel that further instability in Syria would spark a pre-emptive attack on Israel in which the use of weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical and even nuclear bombs – won’t be off the table. It stated that certain groups (proxies, such as Hezbollah) have been armed with WMDs and that Israel will be their target.
The Mashregh commentary charged that Israel is one of the conspirators behind the Syrian crisis in order to strategically change the geopolitics of the region and defeat one of the main players in the Islamic world’s “resistance front” (Iran, Syria and Hezbollah). It warned Israel that with the direction it has chosen, “There is a dead end, and the threat of mass killing awaits.”
Schanzer told FoxNews.com that Hamas’ stockpile of long-range missiles, transported into Gaza via smuggling tunnels, was the real reason behind Israel’s urgency in taking the fight to the designated terrorist group. The mission was to eliminate roughly 100 Iranian-built Fajr5 missiles, capable of reaching Tel Aviv. The weapons were reportedly smuggled into Gaza through Egypt.
Further, Schanzer argues the operation in Israel began three weeks before the military campaign began after a “Iranian-owned Yarmouk armaments factory” in Sudan was hit with devastating air strikes. The Sudanese government holds Israel responsible, however, both Israel and the U.S. deny any knowledge of the attack.
The grave threat posed by the Fajr5 rockets may have been enough for both leaders to agree that something had to be done – and fast,” the report states.
Additionally, the Sudanese factory occurred at exactly the same time that a joint Israeli/U.S. military exercise, “Austere Challenge,” was occurring.
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