TEHRAN - Launching rockets from the occupied West Bank indicates the start of a new phase. 

According to the Israeli military, two rockets were launched from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin earlier this week.

The projectiles are believed to have been short-range and homemade. No casualties were reported. 

"The rockets did not pose a threat to communities (settlements) in the area," an Israeli military statement said.

The statement added that the rockets traveled around 300 feet and that these "were makeshift rockets, with very limited capabilities".

As with all Israeli statements, they cannot be taken at face value, but the regime did say it was investigating the incident. And it should. These are dangerous times for Israel, not the other way round. Palestinians have become used to death and war crimes.

Footage has gone viral on social media, which claims to be the rocket launch. Palestinians can be heard saying the target of the projectile was an Israeli settlement in the northern occupied Palestinian territories. 

According to the footage, the next rocket that will be fired at Israeli settlements will have a heavier payload.

What the Israeli regime fails to understand is that the resistance operates under the motto of strategic patience and all the regime’s crimes – past, present, and future – face a counter reaction.

Retaliation against Israeli atrocities comes at a time and a place when the resistance decides. This has made the Palestinians more powerful over time.

In the early hours of Monday morning, an Israeli battalion began another "extensive" raid on Jenin. A number of Palestinians have been killed after at least seven drones fired missiles, flattening a residential home. Dozens of others sustained injuries.

The resistance said it was confronting the Israeli ground troops with bullets and destroying military vehicles with explosive devices.

Last month alone, the regime’s crackdown in the occupied West Bank, saw Israeli forces kill at least 24 Palestinians, five of them children, according to the Palestinian Information Center. The NGO says most of the deaths occurred in the flashpoint city of Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp.

This included the use of Apache helicopters for the first time in two decades during a large raid in Jenin that killed seven Palestinians and terrorized the indigenous people of the land.  

Jenin is the same place from where the Palestinians launched rockets for the first time.

Since the start of 2023, Israeli forces have martyred nearly 190 Palestinians, setting the record for the bloodiest year in the occupied West Bank since the second Intifada.

But circumstances have changed since the second Intifada, when the Gaza Strip was also under Israeli occupation. Back then, Palestinians resisted with stones and a limited number of Kalashnikovs.

The reality of the West Bank rockets is exactly how the resistance in the besieged Gaza Strip operated more than two decades ago.

Rockets from Gaza then were homemade and short range and they inflicted little damage to the occupation regime. By 2006, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza following retaliatory operations that included the launch of rockets.

With time, those rockets became more powerful and have become the most effective tool to deter Israel from prolonging its wars on Gaza.  

Today, the resistance in Gaza has the ability to manufacture sophisticated missiles that have evaded Israel's so-called Iron Dome system and advanced David's Sling. 

These are the same systems that Israel regularly boasts about (to its settlers) over their effectiveness to counter multiple threats, such as a barrage of rockets. 

However, over the past several years, Israel’s claims have proven to be fake.

Every time that Israel wages a war on Gaza, its military sites and vital infrastructure are targeted and damaged by missiles fired from Gaza.

Over the years, massive rocket barrage fire from a tiny besieged coastal enclave has seen the resistance emerge victorious, with the occupation regime failing to achieve its stated military goals. Instead, Israel has resorted to its usual practice of massacring women and children in its desperate attempts to bring about calm, as its settlers hid in underground shelters.

Over the past two years resistance in the West Bank has become increasingly more effective and sophisticated, similar to what happened in the Gaza Strip.

The new West Bank resistance movement is waging retaliatory operations against the occupation regime that do not make the headlines and it is now following the wisdom of the Gaza Strip when it started manufacturing homemade projectiles to expand its retaliatory operations.

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that in the not-so-distant future, the homemade rockets launched from the occupied West Bank will no longer be branded as homemade anymore.  

The creation of missiles requires knowledge. And knowledge is not something you can smuggle in vessels from abroad to a country under siege from land, sea and air. It can simply be passed on through communication.

Knowledge also comes with awareness of current events. This is something the Palestinian youth have in abundance in the occupied West Bank. They would not have taken up arms had it not been for their awareness that failing to do so would see them ethnically cleansed under the most fascist cabinet in Israel’s short history.

Over the past month, intense gun battles between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance occurred mostly in Jenin and Nablus. Israel resorted to Apache helicopter gunships for the first time; the Palestinians responded swiftly but this generation is not the type of generation that will stay silent against the regime’s almost daily raids in the occupied West Bank.

The Secretary-General of the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, said on Saturday that the movement has worked and is working to form resistance brigades across West Bank cities and to arm them according to their military capabilities.

In an interview, al-Nakhalah confirmed that the size and capabilities of these battalions vary from one place to another according to the capabilities available.

Al-Nakhala pointed out that battalions and resistance factions in all occupied Palestinian cities bore responsibility for the current status quo.  

In addition, the Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement highlighted that what is being witnessed today is an act of resistance, in which missiles, mortars and explosives are used to strike the occupied cities. He added the experience of decades of occupation is something the resistance movement and the Palestinian people have benefited from.

Events on the ground do suggest that the days of just throwing stones at Israeli tanks, however brave that was, are long gone. A new era is emerging. The era of rockets and missiles.