Foreign Affairs Ministry calls for urgent action against Israeli attacks against Palestinians

The Lebanese Foreign Affairs Ministry condemned on Saturday the Israeli attack against the Palestinians in the occupied city of Jerusalem.
“Settlers are working to displace the citizens of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood under the sight if the whole world, in a behavior that does not differ from the practices of ethnic cleansing," the ministry said in a statement.

It also condemned the storming of the Israeli forces of the al-Aqsa Mosque and “the brutal attack on innocent worshipers with sound bombs, gas and rubber bullets, in blatant violation of human rights and International laws and charts.”

The ministry called on the International community to "take urgent and immediate action to deter the repeated attacks of the Israeli enemy against the brotherly Palestinian people and the al-Aqsa Mosque." 

The statement reiterated Lebanon’s "solidarity with the brotherly Palestinian people", stressing its "right to establish an independent Palestinian state, as per the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, as per the resolutions of the International legitimacy and the Arab Peace Initiative issued in Beirut in 2002."

Israeli police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades towards rock-hurling Palestinian youth at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday amid growing anger over the potential eviction of Palestinians from homes on land claimed by Jewish settlers.

At least 205 Palestinians and 17 officers were injured in the night-time clashes at Islam's third-holiest site and around East Jerusalem, Palestinian medics and Israeli police said, as thousands of Palestinians faced off with several hundred Israeli police in riot gear.

Tension has mounted in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, with nightly clashes in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah - a neighborhood where numerous Palestinian families face eviction in a long-running legal case.

 

LBCI/REUTERS