TEHRAN- This year's event comes as the Israeli regime is facing challenges from within, the resistance and abroad. 

International Quds Day is a global event where mass anti-Israel protests take place around the world. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Imam Khomeini, initiated the day of solidarity with Palestine on the last Friday of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. 

Israel is witnessing growing resistance against its colonialism, most significantly over the past year, from the occupied West Bank. 

Gone are the days when Israeli troops enjoyed the freedom to raid West Bank towns and villages to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians residing there. 

Today, newly formed armed resistance factions by the West Bank youth have changed the equation and are taking the battle to Israel's occupation troops.

They are conducting armed retaliatory operations against the regime's occupation including at its many military checkpoints scattered across the West Bank. Those retaliatory operations have struck the heart of the occupied territories, Tel Aviv.

They are also refusing to surrender to the regime's almost daily pre-dawn invasion of Palestinian towns and villages. Instead, these youths are confronting special forces in armed clashes, battles that usually last several hours. 

Their refusal to surrender explains the high Palestinian death toll. Israeli forces have murdered around 100 Palestinians so far this year.

It's no wonder Israel plans to set up a "National Guard" (in what critics have been described as a settler militia) to handle the West Bank resistance. 

"A picture that speaks a thousand words"

That's how Israeli media described a photo published on April 9, 2023 of a meeting between the Secretary General of Lebanon's Hezbollah Sayyad Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas political bureau. 

The two leaders met in Beirut on Saturday to discuss "the readiness of the axis of resistance” and to further expand their cooperation in light of Israel's terrorism these days at al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem).

The meeting between Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Hamas movement in the besieged Gaza Strip to expand and improve cooperation will be seen as a major concern among the security apparatus of the Zionist entity.

The salvo of missiles fired from Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in response to Israel’s desecration of al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third holiest site) indicated one key element:

The regime responded by striking farmland in Lebanon and airstrikes in the Gaza Strip for one night. In both attacks it was careful not to kill anybody as it cannot afford a wider conflict with the Palestinian resistance.

It also cannot embark on a war with Hezbollah as it knows very well the powerful resistance movement has weapons that can strike deep inside all occupied territories, including precision missiles that can hit very sensitive sites, including Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant.

The same can be said about the Gaza Strip. Israel cannot afford a conflict with the Palestinian resistance in the blockaded coastal enclave as the resistance has missiles in its hands that can hit vital Israeli infrastructure and humiliate the regime.

With the power of the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza significantly growing, Israel can’t even wage a war to divert attention from the crisis the entity is witnessing from within.

There have been mass protests by Israelis against their new coalition’s plans to overhaul the regime’s so-called judicial system.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets and clashed with forces in protest against the proposed measures by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-orthodox and fascist cabinet.

Such is the extent of the fighting within Israel and warnings by the regime’s President and other officials of a “civil war”, Netanyahu’s cabinet was forced to postpone the plans for a month.

But as the English say, he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If Netanyahu drops his overhaul plans, he could end up in prison for corruption charges as well as members of his fragile coalition withdrawing, which would mean an end to his majority in the Israeli Knesset.

That would result in another record fifth election in less than five years. There has never been so much internal division within the entity’s 75 years of occupation of Palestine. Nevertheless, Netanyahu needs to keep his cabinet at any cost. This explains the vicious storming into al-Aqsa Mosque and committing terror on innocent worshipers in a desperate bid to appease the settlers.

If there is anything that brings a smile on the settler’s faces, it is footage of the occupation troops mercilessly attacking women and men inside al-Aqsa Mosque. But again, this comes with its ramifications that Israel will face in the near future.

So much is the division over Netanyahu’s overhaul plans of the judiciary that even segments in nearly all of the regime’s military armed forces and units withdrew from crucial training, which Israeli military officials, in turn, said poses a direct threat to the existence of the occupation.

In another major setback for Israel, its staunchest supporter, the United States has lost its clout in West Asia as witnessed by the recent detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as the steady restoration of ties between Syria and the Arab world. 

In a sign of how developments are quickly changing in West Asia, a Saudi delegation travelled to the Yemeni capital Sana’a for talks with the head of the popular Ansarullah revolution, not the other way round.

This was not the case two decades ago, when Washington had major influence on the region. That influence is now shifting to the countries in West Asia itself. 

Alongside that, such is the fascist language being publicly broadcast by the minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, that it has forced the U.S. to end its decades long protocol of inviting a new Israel’s Prime Minister to the White House within two or three months.

Netanyahu, who assumed power again in January is still waiting for an invitation to hold talks with President Joe Biden. And he may have to wait longer.

On March 28, when Biden stressed he is not going to invite the Israeli prime minister to Washington “in the near term”, Netanyahu publicly hit back at the U.S. President, underscoring the tense relationship between the current White House and the Israeli occupation.

However, it all goes back to the indigenous people of the land.

On Sunday Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pointed out that the Palestinian nation’s perseverance has pushed the occupying regime to the brink of collapse.

Israel has never been in a fragile state (pardon the pun) as it is now, facing so many crises from within and from the developments in the region as well as the international community as it continues to pursue its extremely racist agenda.