"Nobody can touch the sacredness of the blessed al-Aqsa mosque, for the rights of God cannot be violated,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned Sunday in a speech to parliament.
The Egyptian head of state strongly criticized Israel for having "violently retaliated to the Palestinian people's collective expression of their rejection of occupation.”
"I hope Israel learned its lesson,” he said in a speech inaugurating the five-year term of the new parliament, elected a month ago.
Mubarak said the Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, was triggered by a "hostile and thoughtless plot directed against the al-Aqsa mosque, the Holy of Holies of the Islamic nation, located in a city (Jerusalem) meant to be an enlightening example of cohabitation between all faiths".
“ Each time I met the Israeli prime minister (Ehud Barak), I warned him that the Jerusalem issue was extremely sensitive,” Mubarak said.
"I told him Jerusalem was not to be bargained with and that even the Palestinian Authority did not have the freedom to decide, since all Muslim and Christian peoples were concerned,” he added.
"The path to reconciliation and cohabitation (between Israel and Arabs) is the fair and global peace based on law and legality, and not on violence and the law of the jungle,” Mubarak said -- CAIRO (AFP)
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