AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas resistance movement, has stressed that all Palestinians are united to defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Quds.
In a phone call with Ekremeh Sabri, the preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, on Sunday, Haniyeh condemned the Zionist regime’s raid on his house and interrogation of the senior cleric.
Haniyeh said the raid is “an attack on one of the senior figures in our Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa,” expressing his solidarity with Sabri and all scholars in Al-Quds as well as participants in a sit-in at Al-Aqsa.
“Our Palestinian people as a whole stand behind our scholars and sit-inners in defending Al-Quds and the Al-Aqsa Mosque” and its Islamic identity, he said.
Earlier on Sunday, Sabri said Zionist regime authorities had questioned him. The interrogation, which lasted for about five hours, focused on his prayers at the prayer space at the Bab al-Rahma gate amid an Israeli court’s decision to close it.
Weeks of Zionist harassment of Palestinians in Al-Quds and attempts to appropriate Palestinian lands in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood were followed by the the occupying regime’s bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip in May this year.
The Zionist aggression on Gaza killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,900 others.
In another development, the Palestinian Authority reacted to remarks made by Zionist prime minister Naftali Bennett calling a Palestinian state “a terror state.”
In a statement on Sunday, Nabil Abu Rudeineh said “the occupation [itself] is the essence of terrorism,” the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported.
“The Palestinian state, with East Al-Quds as its capital, is a state recognized by the countries of the world, and has been an observer member of the United Nations since November 29, 2012,” the statement added.
Palestinians, he added, were, therefore, needless of the occupying regime official’s remarks to either justify or invalidate their rights.
Meanwhile, according to reports, the United States is reportedly exercising pressure on Sudan to officially normalize its relations with the Zionist regime, a process that is conditioned on a Sudanese parliamentary approval.
Reporting on Sunday, the occupying regime’s public broadcaster Kan said, “Washington’s pressures come after a year, during which the United States invested money in Sudan, without making any real progress” in the normalization process.
The broadcaster’s report did not offer any details about either the type of the American “investment” in Sudan or the form of the pressure that was being applied by Washington upon Khartoum.
It, however, pointed to existence of “differences” between the military and civilian components of the Transitional Sovereign Council, which has been tasked with pro tempore running of the country’s affairs, over the normalization process.
Sudan agreed to sign a normalization agreement with the Zionist regime last October, a month after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed such détente deals with Tel Aviv with Washington’s facilitation.