Waqf Minister Warns of Deforming Occupied Jerusalem

With thanks to imra.org.il for providing this important press release.

[IMRA: It should be noted that the “Cairo Declaration” conditions “calm” on “Israel’s adherence to stopping all aggression… “.
www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=24576.
The following presentation by a PA official pre-positions justification for the Palestinians to break the “calm”.

“… on August 29,1969 when a deranged Australian tourist, twenty-eight-year-old Denis Michael Rohan, a fundamentalist Christian, set fire to the al-Aksa Mosque.” Martin Gilbert in “Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century” p.308. – that’s “fundamentalist Christian” – not “extremist Jewish settler”]

Waqf Minister Warns of Deforming Occupied Jerusalem
www.ipc.gov.ps/ipc_new/english/details.asp?name=3363

GAZA, Palestine, March21, 2005 (IPC Exclusive)[official PA website]–Palestinian Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs, Yousef Salama, warned on Sunday of frequent Israeli attacks on the Palestinian territories that are intended at deforming the Palestinian demographic status, especially in the occupied east Jerusalem.

In a press conference held in the Gaza-based State Information Service’s International Press Center (IPC), minister Salama said that the Jews have no right to the occupied east Jerusalem, indicating a series of Israeli crimes and practices towards such an Arab city.

Mr. Salama numerated the attacks as; building a settlement belt around the city, cutting off the city from the West Bank areas, constructing a ‘catastrophic’ Apartheid Wall within its boundaries, imposing high taxes on its Palestinian population, forcing inhabitants out of the city after canceling their Jerusalem ID, inhabiting Jewish settlers on the city’s soil and carrying out excavations beneath the Al-Aqsa holy mosque.

Among the most serious risks, the city is facing now days is an Israeli project to expand Jerusalem boundaries, the Israeli Finance Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had formulated some years ago, the Palestinian minister explained.

Mr. Salama further said that the Israeli occupation authorities have been planning to build a large settlement belt around the city, aiming at deforming the city into a Jewish area with very limited Arab population.

The minister showed reporters a copy of a map on the Israeli schemes pertaining to possible bombing attack on the occupied Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa holy mosque, the Waqf ministry has already prepared.

Salama believed that the Israelis are keen to perpetrate such a crime, criticizing the United Nations non-serious stance towards a series of pending Palestine-related resolutions, especially those regarding the occupied east Jerusalem.

As for the underway clandestine transfer of Palestinian Orthodox Christian-owned properties in the old city of Jerusalem to extremist Jewish groups, minister Salama decried such actions, praising the positions of Palestinian Christians who deemed the purchase null and void and demanded that those behind such a deal be brought to justice immediately.

From the IPC, he called on both the Arab and Islamic nations to move swiftly to prevent the Islamic and Christian holly places from being endangered or purchased, as from a Shari’a (religious legislation) perspective, dealing with holy places is utterly prohibited.

Mr. Salama held the Israeli government responsible fully for any possible attack on the Al-Aqsa mosque, as it is the sole body capable of disclosing or foiling such Jewish settlers schemes.

He addressed the upcoming Arab summit in Algeria, calling on the Arab nations’ leaders to take the issue seriously, just as the case in 1969, when parts of the Al-Aqsa mosque were set into fire by an extremist Jewish settler.