Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is currently contacting Arab and foreign leaders in a bid to defuse the crisis in the Occupied Territories and halt Israeli attacks on the Palestinians, said Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher on Wednesday.
“The results of these contacts will be revealed soon,” Al Ahram daily quoted Maher as saying.
The minister warned that Israel’s continuing attacks on the Palestinians would lead to a “real catastrophe,” asking the US to play a greater role in the region.
Last week, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat called on the US to use its “special relationship” with Israel to pressure its close ally into halting attacks on Palestinians, an expectation that contrasts sharply with Washington’s track record on behalf of the big-spending pro-Israel lobby.
"We are aware of the particular relationship between the United States and Israel, and we have deployed enormous efforts for that relationship to be a factor in pressing the Israeli government to cease its aggression against our people and our holy places," Arafat said in prepared remarks released before the Cairo meeting of Arab foreign ministers on Thursday.
The oft-repeated Israeli stance, however, is that the international community cannot interfere with its efforts to quell the latest Palestinian uprising in lands conquered by the Jewish state in 1967, then settled with tens of thousands of Israelis in defiance of international law and the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
This rejection of outside interference has extended to rejecting Palestinians’ repeated appeals for international ceasefire monitors, which this week, as in March, succeeded thanks to rigid US support in the UN Security Council.
In fact, the US has showed little sign of wavering in its support for Israel, and, according to CNN, in January signed a memorandum of understanding with the Jewish state to increase military aid by $60 million, reaching $2.4 billion by 2008.
Israel spends the majority of the aid money on products from the US defense industry, an Israeli official told CNN at the time – Albawaba.com
