The presidents of Tunisia and Yemen have called for the Arabs to mobilize their resources to defend the Palestinians in their confrontation with Israel, officials said Wednesday.
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh, at a meeting in Tunis late Tuesday, also blasted "the cowardly aggressions committed against Palestinian citizens by Israel's occupation forces".
They reaffirmed "unwavering support for the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and, in particular, their right to set up an independent state with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as capital".
In response to Israel's killings of dozens of Palestinian demonstrators, Saleh and Ben Ali called for "a mobilization of all the potential of the Arab world in the service of the Palestinian cause".
The Yemeni leader, unlike his Arab counterparts, has proposed military support for the Palestinian people.
On Iraq, Saleh and the Tunisian president called for a lifting of the decade-old UN embargo against Baghdad "within the framework of international law and in a way to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Iraq.
Tunisia and Yemen have joined a rush of Arab flights to Baghdad since late September to challenge a UN air traffic embargo and in solidarity with Iraq against the sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait – TUNIS (AFP)
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