European campaign calls on EU to act promptly to rescue Gaza

[ 26/04/2008 - 10:12 AM ]

BRUSSELS, (PIC)--

The European campaign to lift the siege on Gaza hailed the EU's call for saving the Gaza Strip and resuming supplying it with its fuel needs immediately, considering it a step in the right direction, but it has to be followed by a practical move to pressure Israel to comply with this call.

In a statement issued by the development and humanitarian aid commission, the EU stated that it was unacceptable to deprive Gaza from fuel supplies, warning that this would affect the provision of basic services to the Gazans. 

Amin Abu Rashed, the head of the European campaign, underlined that the EU is invited to intervene urgently and practically to end the unjust Israeli siege and to exercise all necessary pressures in this regard, especially after the UNRWA stopped to provide relief aid to more than 80 percent of the Gaza population because of lack of fuel for its vehicles.

In another context, MP Mushir Al-Masri, the secretary-general of the Hamas parliamentary bloc, highlighted that the suffocating Israeli siege imposed on the Palestinian people in general and Gaza in particular failed to achieve its goals and would never succeed in subduing the Palestinian people and making them relinquish their historical and religious rights.

Masri pointed out that the PLC approved a law on the protection of the Palestinian resistance against anyone trying to harm it or to strip it of its legitimacy, adding that any act against resistance is considered an act of treason punishable under this law.

Meanwhile, the Arab national conference appealed to the Islamic and Arab nation and the world's free men and women to extend help to the Palestinian people in order to be able to withstand the ongoing Israeli aggression against them, announcing that there are preparations for launching popular aid convoys from Mauritania and Yemen towards the Rafah border crossing.

In a statement issued in protest at the withdrawal of delegates of Britain, France and US from the closed meeting of the UN Security Council after Libya's delegate described what is happening against Gaza as a holocaust, the conference called for contributing to the success of the popular Arab convoys heading to Gaza as well as to the success of the Arab day of grief and anger on 15/5 which marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakbah (catastrophe) or the usurpation of Palestine at hands of Zionist gangs.

The statement also underscored that "France and the western countries have to choose between bragging about democracy, freedom and human rights and supporting terrorism and crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people in broad daylight."

The conference appealed in this regard to the Egyptian leadership to break the siege on Gaza through opening the Rafah crossing and to provide all means of life for the impoverished Gaza people.