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Hamas to restart weekly Gaza border riots

The violent “Great March of Return” protests are set to resume.

Palestinian Clashes at Gaza Border
Gazans at the border with Israel during a “Great March of Return” riot, May, 4, 2018. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Hamas has decided to restart the “Great March of Return” at the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel.

The decision was made on Wednesday by the “Supreme National Authority for the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege” to begin to rehabilitate the “return camps” near the security fence in the eastern Gaza Strip, Assabeel, an Islamist weekly newspaper based in Amman, reported.

The activities are set to start next week “in light of the occupation’s tightening of its siege on the Gaza Strip, and the inability of the mediators to bind it to previous agreements,” sources told the Iraq-based Sada News Agency.

It was also reported that the decision was made due to the escalation in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria, in addition to the Israeli threat to “assassinate leaders of the resistance.”

The “Great March of Return” campaign was initially organized in March 2018, on the 42nd anniversary of Land Day. The violent protests, which Gazans staged nearly every week along the border, lasted from March 30, 2018, until Dec. 27, 2019.

During the last period of activity, thousands of rioters prompted by the Hamas terrorist group that rules the Strip committed acts of violence at the border on a near-weekly basis, including throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails and other explosive objects at the security fence and IDF soldiers as well as burning tires, yelling anti-Israel slogans and waving Palestinian flags.

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