Iran calls for global measures against Israeli occupation of Palestine

The Iranian Foreign Ministry released a statement on Thursday, on the eve of Nakba Day (the Day of Catastrophe), when back in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their homeland and Israel proclaimed existence.

It said, “72 years ago, on this day, the Zionist immigrants massacred people of the land of Palestine — including men, women, the youth, the elderly and innocent children — and forced them out of their homes while using deviant and racist ideas and thoughts as a pretext. [That is how] the Palestinian land and the entire West Asia were afflicted with Zionist Nakba.”

Palestinians mark Nakba Day on May 15, a day after the occupying regime declared existence.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry described Nakba Day as the starting point of Israeli crimes against the true owners of Palestine, including building settlements, further displacing the Palestinians, desecrating the al-Aqsa Mosque, maintaining a crippling siege on Gaza, and annexing the occupied side of Syria’s Golan Heights.

The statement also censured new US-backed attempts by the Israeli regime to annex more Palestinian land.

The ministry expressed Iran’s “full solidarity” with the Palestinian cause, rejecting a “humiliating” peace plan drawn up by the administration of US President Donald Trump to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It also emphasized that international bodies, especially the United Nations, need to shoulder their responsibility and “set the stage for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland and a referendum joined by the true inhabitants of this land — including Muslims, Christians and Jews — so they can exercise the right to decide their own fate and form an independent Palestinian government with holy Quds as [the state’s] capital.”

The ministry referred to Palestine as the most pressing issue of the Muslim world “despite all conspiracies to sink it into oblivion.”

The ministry reiterated Iran’s “unchangeable” stance Palestine and called on the “Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Muslim nations and governments in addition to other freedom-seeking nations to take effective measures to support Palestinians [in their efforts] to liberate their land.”

Over the course of nearly three and a half years since it took over, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive approach against the Palestinians and in favor of the Israeli regime.

Defying international outcry, the US president announced in January the general provisions of the “peace” plan at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side.

The scheme — which all Palestinian groups have unanimously rejected — largely meets Israel’s demands in the decades-old conflict, while creating a Palestinian state with limited control over its own security and borders.

It enshrines Jerusalem al-Quds as “Israel’s undivided capital” and allows the regime to annex settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Jordan Valley, among other controversial terms.

Palestinian leaders, who severed all ties with Washington in late 2017 after Trump recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of the Israeli regime, immediately rejected the plan, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas saying it “belongs to the dustbin of history.”