Arab ministerial committee rejects ‘Israel’s measures to isolate Jerusalem’

Cairo: An Arab ministerial committee here rejected “the Israeli measures to isolate Jerusalem,” stressing that “Israel has no sovereignty over Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian holy sites”.

The committee, in charge of international action to confront illegal Israeli policies and measures in Jerusalem, issued a joint statement on Thursday following its 10th meeting on the sidelines of the 164th regular meeting of the Council of the Arab League (AL), Xinhua news agency reported.

The committee, formed by the AL in 2021 and chaired by Jordan, includes Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and the AL Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

In the statement, the committee condemned Israel’s recent approval of the E1 settlement plan as a prelude to “besieging the Old City and isolating it from its Palestinian surroundings”.

The approval is an attempt to “undermine the establishment of a Palestinian state and a blatant assault on the right of the Palestinian people to embody their independent state,” it said.

It condemned all measures aimed at changing the demographic composition and the historical and religious character of Jerusalem, noting that these measures are in opposition to international laws and legitimate international resolutions.

It also criticised Israel’s attempts to “impose facts and practices aimed at the temporal and spatial division” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and to limit the free access of Muslim worshippers to the compound.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War of 1967 and has since built settlements widely deemed illegal under international law. It has accelerated settlement activities in recent years.

In late August, it approved the construction of 3,401 housing units in E1, located east of Jerusalem, linking the large-scale settlement of Maale Adumim with East Jerusalem.

Settlement construction there is believed to effectively divide the West Bank into northern and southern parts, cutting off Palestinian territorial continuity between East Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah, while creating a continuous Jewish population corridor between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, located in East Jerusalem, is now administered by the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, through its Jerusalem Awqaf and Al-Aqsa Mosque Affairs Department, but is secured by Israeli police.

Under a long-held status quo, Jews are allowed to visit the site but not to pray there.

However, some far-right Israelis have increasingly defied this restriction by praying at the site in recent years.

IANS