RABAT (Dispatches) – Human rights activists have demonstrated in front of the Moroccan parliament building in the capital Rabat in protest at the visit of the chief of staff of the Zionist regime’s army, Aviv Kochavi. This is the first public visit of its kind and will last three days.

The protest was called by the popular National Action Group for Palestine, which opposes normalization between Morocco and the occupying regime. Demonstrators chanted slogans condemning the visit and normalization.

Kochavi arrived in Morocco as part of the framework to strengthen military cooperation between the occupying regime and Rabat, which started to take shape in April 2020. He is expected to meet with senior officials in the military establishment in Morocco.

According to the head of the Moroccan Observatory against Normalization, Ahmed Wehman, the protest represented “condemnation of the visit of the war criminal,” who, as he put it, “shed the blood of thousands of Lebanese and Arab Palestinians.”

He told Anadolu news agency, “His [Kochavi’s] place is in court so that justice can have its say with him, and he will be punished for what he has committed with his hands, which are stained with the blood of innocents.”

The Zionist regime and Morocco signed a memorandum of understanding at the end of November last year during the visit of the occupying regime’s war minister Benny Gantz to Rabat. Diplomatic relations between the two were resumed in December 2020 after a break of twenty years. Morocco froze relations following the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000.

The government in Morocco is the fourth Arab regime to normalize relations with the regime since 2020, after the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan. Egypt and Jordan each signed treaties with the regime in 1979 and 1994 respectively.

 

‘Sharp Decline in Persian Gulf Support for Normalization’ 

 

Meanwhile, a survey conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI) has found that public support for the normalization of ties with the occupying regime has declined sharply in three Persian Gulf states.

The results of the survey, the TWI said, demonstrated that the percentage of those who view the so-called Abraham Accords favorably in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE has dropped.

According to TWI, the new survey was compared to polling from 2020, noting that more than two thirds of citizens in Bahrain, KSA and the UAE now view the Abraham Accords unfavorably.

“Current attitudes contrast with the relative optimism exhibited by a significant percentage of Emiratis, Bahrainis, Saudis and even some Egyptians in the months after the announcement of the Abraham Accords,” TWI said.

“When first polled in November 2020, attitudes in the UAE and Bahrain were effectively split as to whether they saw the agreement in a positive or negative light,” it said.

It added: “Apart from the people of the signatory countries, 40 percent of Saudis and Qataris then also supported the Accords. Now, the percentage of those who see the agreement in a positive light hover between 19 percent to 25 percent in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE.”