Nour Abu Aisha
28 March 2019•Update: 28 March 2019
GAZA CITY, Palestine
Planned demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel buffer zone -- slated for this Saturday -- will be entirely peaceful in nature, Palestinian resistance factions said Thursday.
Saturday’s rallies will mark the passage of one year since Palestinians began holding regular demonstrations along the buffer zone on March 30 of last year.
“We stress the necessity of keeping the rallies peaceful so as not to give the [Israeli] occupation the chance to employ force, which it can exploit for perceived electoral advantages,” Khaled al-Batsh, a leading Islamic Jihad member, told reporters on Thursday.
He also called on those who plan to take part in the rallies to take precautions against Israeli sniper-fire, urging them to confine their activities to five camps set up near the buffer zone by Gaza’s National Authority for Breaking the Siege.
The five camps are reportedly located in or near Gaza City, Jabaliya, the Al-Bureij refugee camp, Khan Younis and Rafah.
Saturday’s rally will also mark Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the killing of six Arab-Israelis by Israeli forces in 1976 during protests against land confiscations.
Al-Batsh also called on Palestinians in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to stage simultaneous demonstrations on Saturday.
In the run-up to Saturday’s planned rally, the Israeli army reportedly dispatched reinforcements to the fraught buffer zone.
On Wednesday, Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee tweeted photos purporting to show large military encampments -- teeming with soldiers and tanks -- set up in the area.
Since Palestinians in Gaza began staging the rallies one year ago, more than 250 demonstrators have been martyred by Israeli army gunfire.
Protesters demand the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in historical Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the new state of Israel.
They also demand an end to Israel’s 12-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has gutted the enclave’s economy and deprived its roughly two million inhabitants of many basic commodities.
