PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday issued a statement on the occasion of the ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People’, stressing that the dangerous escalation in the region is mainly caused by the absence and disregard for rights.
The President added that the Gaza Strip is under an existential threat and deliberate and systematic targeting of civilians.
He called for an end to the silent annexation, settlement and racial discrimination measures in the entire occupied Palestinian territory, noting that what is required is to provide urgent international protection for Palestinian people and achieve justice through accountability and responsibility.
The President stressed the necessity of taking strategic steps to address the strategic threat to the two-state solution. He added that the PLO rejected the liquidation projects for the Palestinian issue and the fragmented solutions and maintained the independent national decision-making and absolute sovereignty of Palestinian people over their land.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said yesterday that the United States and Israel have failed to eradicate the Palestinian Hamas resistance group and lost their war on the besieged Gaza Strip.
He confirmed that the current humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas was the result of the failure of Washington and Tel Aviv to eliminate Hamas through the war. He added: ‘Today, we see that the US and Israel are not capable of destroying Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a liberation movement and will remain in Palestine.
‘The winners of the war are the Palestinian nation and resistance. So far, the United States and the Zionist regime have been the main losers of this war.’
This victory has not come cheaply. ‘Since the start of the aggression, the Tel Aviv regime has killed over 15,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and left vast swathes of the coastal enclave in ruins.
‘An additional 7,000 Palestinians are missing and believed to be under the rubble in Gaza, home to more than two million Palestinians who are being subjected to a “complete siege” imposed by Israel.’
Amir-Abdollahian added: ‘The US must choose between the continuations of this situation as well as the region’s separation from the war, and the continuation of a worse situation.’
The top Iranian diplomat also said that the US has sent several messages to Iran, asking the country to exercise restraint. Washington, he added, also said that it does not seek an expansion of the war and asked Tehran to recommend resistance groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen not to act against American and Israeli bases.
‘There are groups today in Iraq and Syria that act against the US upon their own decision. They do not get our permission. They are not under Iran’s command. We have clearly said that Iran does not have any proxy group or organisation in the region,’ Amir-Abdollahian said.
‘We told all actors and the US that if you want restraint on the part of Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and other sides…, you should practically seek to stop the war and not take sides with the Zionist occupation and participate in its crimes.’
Meanwhile, the Iranian foreign minister said ‘new fronts in southern Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq rushed to the help of Gaza, noting that some Arab-Muslim nations showed that they cannot remain indifferent to the massacre of civilians in the Palestinian enclave.’
The TUC is calling a Special Congress on Saturday December 9 at Congress House to discuss its campaign against the Tories’ latest anti-trade union legislation.
The WRP and the Young Socialists have called a lobby of the TUC Special Congress for 9am on December 9th, to urge it to call a general strike to smash the anti- union laws and to support the Palestinian masses who are battling bravely for their national rights and for a Palestinian state ‘from the River to the Sea’.
Millions of workers can see that capitalism is not just in a desperate crisis, and is in fact in its death agony, and wants to carry the working people of the world over the edge of the abyss with it.
As the recent huge demonstrations for Palestine show the working class of the UK and its youth supports the Palestinian revolution.
December 9th must be the day when the TUC invites the Palestinian leadership to address the Congress and calls a general strike to smash the Tories and give powerful support to establishing the state of Palestine, from the ‘River to the Sea!’
