‘The occupation is exploiting the world’s preoccupation with the aggression on Iran and Lebanon to escalate its attacks on the Gaza Strip, tighten the siege, and close the crossings, especially the Rafah crossing.’
– Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem, 9 March
Under cover of its war with Iran, the Zionist regime is bombing displaced Palestinians across Gaza, committing new massacres and tightening the blockade on the delivery of means of survival. Meanwhile, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank face an even more vicious emboldened wave of settler violence, Israeli internment and torture.
Gaza resists
The Zionist occupation again shut Gaza’s Rafah border crossing on 1 March and stepped up its brutal ceasefire violations across the Strip. Gaza’s ministry of health reported that 15 Palestinians were killed, another 18 bodies retrieved and 37 people injured between 26 February and 5 March. In the following days, the Israeli regime intensified its use of terror against the displaced masses with more than 35 separate daily attacks using drone strikes, tank and naval shelling and gunfire.
On 8 March, International Working Women’s Day, while Sarah Netanyahu hailed the ‘women of Iran’ with an AI picture featuring Israeli military and pro-Shah imagery, the occupation killed popular Palestinian journalist Amal Shamali and two young girls in a bloody massacre at al-Zawaida, where Zionist bombs rained down upon tents of displaced people. Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) denounced Shamali’s killing as ‘a stab in the back of human and feminist rights’. The day also saw the naval bombardment of Khan Younis beach and the killing of three Palestinians, including a paramedic, in an airstrike near the Katiba Mosque.
By 14 March, the number of Palestinians butchered since the 11 October 2025 ceasefire reached 658. At the same time a sandstorm enveloped Gaza, intensifying the suffering of tens of thousands of displaced people in tents and makeshift shelters. Meanwhile, corroborating the recent Lancet report, Stuart Casey-Maslen, head of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, estimates that Gaza’s population has fallen by more than 10% since October 2023, with over 200,000 killed in the Zionist genocide.
Launched on 22 January 2026, the US regime’s colonialist ‘Board of Peace’ (BoP) plan for Gaza is already dead in the water. Reuters confirmed via sources close to the negotiations that discussions on the imperialist push to disarm Hamas and the Palestinian resistance have been ‘paused’, with claims of a speedy victory over Iran already sinking into quicksand. Amidst a deepening chasm between the US and EU, the proposed BoP commissioner for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, warned in early February that ‘All of this needs to move very fast. If we do not, we are not going to implement the second phase of the ceasefire but the second phase of the war’.
Speaking in Doha, Qatar on 8 February, Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal affirmed that ‘In the context that our people are still under occupation, talking about disarmament is an attempt to make our people an easy victim to be eliminated and easily exterminated by Israel, which is armed with all international weaponry.’
West Bank colonialism
On 8 March, three Palestinians were murdered in a settler attack on Abu Falah village, east of Ramallah. Backed up by the army and given carte blanche by the authorities, racist colonialists daily besiege towns and villages, killing and wounding residents, occupying homes, attacking, stealing or killing livestock, carrying out arson attacks and other atrocities. On 14 March, fascist settlers were documented attempting to beat to death a young Palestinian man from Qusra, south of Nablus, hours after attacks on the village which killed one and left three injured.
A day later, four members of the Odeh family, including two young children, were deliberately targeted by Israeli occupation forces as they drove from their village Tammun to buy clothes for Eid. Witnesses reported hearing soldiers boast that ‘We killed dogs’. The occupation forces constantly restrict movement between West Bank villages, distributing threatening leaflets, stating ‘terrorism and terrorists bring only death, destruction and devastation.’
Throughout the month of Ramadan, occupation forces increased attacks on Palestinians attempting to enter al-Aqsa mosque from the West Bank and Jerusalem. On 6 March, a team of 10 UN experts warned of the colonial ‘de-Palestinianisation’ of occupied Jerusalem, under ‘a systematic project of demographic engineering and domination to entrench exclusive Jewish control’.
Settler and state violence are part of Zionist colonisation. Since 2022, the number of illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has risen from 141 to 210. Over the same period, settler attacks have accelerated, climbing to 1,800 in 2025. The neo-fascist security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has doled out weapons licences to colonial fascists, extending the policy in March to 18 more illegal West Bank settlements and 41 Jewish areas of Jerusalem.
Immediately after the Abu Falah village killings, Hamas called for ‘the escalation of resistance across the West Bank in response to the ongoing crimes and settler violence protected by the occupation army.’ Joined by other resistance groups, this call was repeated after the Tammun attack.
In the week up to 13 March, 42 significant popular resistance operations were launched across the West Bank and Jerusalem. These ranged from demonstrations to stone-throwing confrontations against the occupier. On 9 and 10 March, Saraya al-Quds’ al-Khalil (Hebron) and Jenin Brigades targeted military bulldozers and other vehicles with bullets and explosives. Iran and Hezbollah have now hit Zionist colonies in the West Bank with rockets and drones.
Resistance unbowed
Palestinian resistance groups now include Iran and Lebanon in their communiqués, with the Popular Resistance Committees calling for ‘unity and integration at all levels and spheres in order to confront and defeat the Zionist-American aggression against Iran, Lebanon and Gaza’. The PFLP called for ‘the escalation of popular mobilisation and international demonstrations’.
The sharpest contrast exists between, on one side, the British Labour government’s complicity with Zionism’s genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and its accompanying suppression of those supporting Palestinian resistance, and on the other, the Palestinians who are showing the way forward in the fight against Zionist expansionism. In a 4 February statement from Beirut, the Masar Badil movement put the tasks of revolutionaries succinctly:
‘This is the moment for broad mass organising, to fill the streets and squares, and to escalate direct action to shut down the war machine. Revolutionary movements – especially in the imperial core –bear the responsibility of playing their role today in this great battle for Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, the countries of the African Sahel, and others, and for the future of humanity itself.’
