On Saturday, 26 October, the liberated prisoner and resistance fighter Islam Jamil Odeh, one of the leaders of the Ezz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, in Palestine, in Tulkarem, was martyred after fighting with a besieging force of the occupation army for over 10 hours. US-backed Zionist occupation forces attacked his apartment in the Al-Salam neighbourhood of Tulkarem, shooting missiles and shells at the building as he held them off with his handgun, fighting until his last breath for the defense of Palestine.
The occupation forces stormed the besieged building after targeting it with more than 20 Energa missiles, setting it on fire, destroying parts of it with bulldozers, and firing heavily, as Odeh fought back with his handgun.
This type of assassination raid and attack targeting resistance fighters and leaders — often liberated prisoners themselves — often overlaps with “arrest raids” targeting the Palestinian people. The attack on Islam Odeh mirrors many such assassination raids against fighters who refuse to surrender themselves to the occupation or to return to Zionist prisons, such as the cases of the “engaged intellectual” and freedom fighter Basil al-Araj, Ibrahim Nabulsi, Mohammed al-Azizi, Abdel-Rahman Soboh, Saleh Barghouthi, Ashraf Na’alwa, and Moataz Washaha, to name only a few of the recent targets of the current generation of resistance.
Islam Odeh, 29, was an engineer and a leader in the Al-Qassam Brigades, a graduate of Kadoorie Technical University in Tulkarem, where he was active in the Islamic Bloc as a student activist. As they besieged and attacked the building where he was staying, genocidal occupation forces abducted his mother and father, interrogating his parents and attempting to use them to attempt to force him to surrender and return to Zionist prisons. Despite this, amid his deep love and respect for his parents and family, Islam Jamil Odeh decided to fight the colonial army until his last breath, with which he affirmed his testimony of faith in God.
Later, the occupation soldiers were seen storming the house and then kidnapping the body of the martyr from inside the residential building. The occupation forces routinely kidnap the bodies of the martyrs in order to hold them hostage in an attempt to extort concessions from the Palestinian resistance in a prisoner exchange and to impose a form of collective punishment on the martyrs’ families.
Odeh was a former prisoner of the occupation and had also been detained by the security services of the collaborationist “Palestinian Authority.” In fact, in the past week, the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Service attempted to arrest Odeh, after raiding his home more than once, under their “security coordination” with the Zionist occupation. The PA “security” forces also summoned his father and detained him for hours several days prior to his martyrdom.
The martyr Odeh assumed leadership of the Qassam Brigades in Tulkarem after the martyrdom of the previous commander of the Qassam Brigades in Tulkarem, Zahi Yasser Awfi and the leader of the Al-Quds Brigades in the camp, Ghaith Radwan, along with fighters from the resistance factions and multiple Palestinian workers, in a massacre carried out by a US-made Zionist occupation fighter jet that targeted the Tulkarem camp on 3 October. The martyrs of the assault on a cafe in Tulkarem include: Ayman Khaled Tanja (the brother of prisoners Walaa Tanja and Mohammed Tanja “al-Zanklouni”), Asim Nu’man Qawzah, Basil Mahmoud Nafi’, Anwar Mohammed Misimi, Omar Nimer Fayat, Ahmed Jamal Obeid, Muhammad Mamoun Anbas, Athir Mazen Hussein Lawisi, Majdi Jamal Salem, Mahmoud Nasser Khreish, Rawan Jawad Musa Ghanem, Mohammed Tahsin Khalil, Rakan Bilal, Issam Qawzah, Mohammed Abu Zahra, Saja Nasser Khreish, Mohsen Ghazi Dabaya and the children, Karam and Sham Abu Zahra.
Mahmoud Mardawi, a leader in the Hamas movement, saluted the martyr and his fellow resistance fighters in an interview with Al-Mayadeen, praising “the performance of the heroes of the resistance in Tulkarem and its camps, who are confronting the occupation’s incursions with a high fighting spirit full of defiance, courage and daring, and are inflicting heavy losses on its soldiers…Our people know the path to their freedom and dignity, and the resistance in the West Bank today has become unbreakable despite the daily raids, confrontations, and arrests, and despite the great sacrifices made by our heroic resistance fighters in all the West Bank governorates.”
The assassination raid on Islam Jamil Odeh echoes the stories of many martyred Palestinian resistance fighters, particularly former prisoners who refuse to return to the dungeons of the occupation. His battle and courage echo those of the resistance fighters from Gaza to Lebanon and everywhere throughout the region, of the prisoners who fight with their bodies behind bars, of the Palestinians who insist to remain on their land confronting a genocidal Zionist regime and its imperialist sponsors. Despite the massive array of US-made and -provided weaponry arrayed against him by the genocidal occupation regime, he struggled heroically until his last breath, resisting for his people, his land and their liberation.
Victory to the Resistance! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
