Turkey sends Gaza “material to produce rockets”

Israel’s customs authority said that it found 16 tons of material used to produce rockets, reports Reuters, September 14.

The materials were found by the customs authority during an inspection of a delivery from Turkey, which was heading to Gaza.

The authority noted that following a lab test, some of the bags contained ammonium chloride, a mineral used to produce rockets.

On September 12, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was forced to deny a report that his government had approved a shipment of weapons to Palestinian security forces following backlash from ministers in his coalition.

Also, in July of this year, Israel’s customs authority claimed that it intercepted two containers carrying bags of plaster, weighing 54 tons.

Referring to the materials found, heading to Gaza this month, Hamas, a militant Islamist group and Gaza’s ruling party, claimed that it was a “fabrication”.

The Islamist group’s spokesman, Hazem Qassem, said that the report was “lies” and told Reuters that, “The occupation is forging lies as a pretext to tighten the blockade in Gaza”.

Palestine has a population of just under 5.5 million people, 2.3 million of which lived in the occupied region of Gaza. Hamas has ruled the region since 2007 and Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade.

According to Al Jazeera, on August 22, 2023, over 200 Palestinians were murdered in the West Bank this year alone as violent attacks by an increasingly hard-right Israeli state intensifies.

A UN Middle East envoy noted that this year’s death toll in the West Bank (so far) is the highest it’s been since 2005.

This month, Israel stopped the exporting of goods from Gaza for a few days due to what the country claimed to be an attempt to bring in explosives.

Hamas has sought to attract support in the West Bank because of uncertainty over Palestine National Authority’s (PNA) President, Mahmoud Abbas’ future.

The long serving, 87-year-old was recently under fire from Palestinian intellectuals, the European Union and The US for his comments on the Holocaust and Jews moreover.

In a letter published on September 10, 96 prominent Palestinian intellectuals stated, “(We) unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments (of Mahmoud Abbas)”.

REUTERS

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