|
Abbas sets conditions for peace
11/11/2006 19:54 - (SA)
Ramallah, West Bank - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas told Israel on Saturday that it will enjoy neither peace nor security until it withdraws within the borders it had before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
He was speaking to thousands of Palestinians who had gathered at the grave of Yasser Arafat, two years after the veteran leader died at the age of 75, to remember the man who even in death embodies their struggle for independence.
Abbas pledged to continue Arafat's struggle for a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, and vowed not to concede a single foot of Palestinian land.
"Peace and security will not be realised under occupation and settlement and the inclusion of noble Jerusalem into Israel," Abbas told the assembled crowd who held aloft the late leader's portraits in the Muqataa headquarters, decked with Arafat posters and Palestinian flags.
"Israel, if it wants peace, should apply international decisions and withdraw from Palestian and Arab lands to the 1967 borders," Abbas said.
Leading Palestinian figures, cloaked in black and Arafat's trademark white checkered kefiya (headscarf), laid wreaths at Arafat's grave which Palestinians want moved to east Jerusalem, the hoped-for capital of their future state.
Arafat was the joint recipient with the late Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin of the 1994 Nobel peace prize. But he was boycotted by Israel and the United States in his final years as a terrorist and an obstacle to peace.
His death on November 11, 2004 refuelled hopes for progress in the Middle East peace process, but the daily lives of Palestinians have grown only more desperate since then.
In the run-up to Saturday's anniversary, almost 100 Palestinians were killed in a week of Israeli army operations, mainly in the Gaza Strip, to which Arafat had returned in triumph from exile in 1994.
- AFP
|
News
