Zarif Cancels Visit to Austria Over Zionist Flag

Pro-Palestinian Protesters March Across World

Date: 15 May 2021 - 21:47

News ID: ۹۰۲۳۶

PARIS/ZURICH (Dispatches) – Thousands of protesters in London and Madrid marched in support of Palestinians on Saturday as the worst violence in years by the occupying regime of Israel raged in Gaza.
In London, several thousand protesters carrying placards reading "Stop Bombing Gaza” and chanting "Free Palestine” converged on Marble Arch, near the British capital’s Hyde Park, to march towards the Israeli embassy.
In Madrid, some 2,500 people, many of them young people wrapped in Palestinian flags, marched to the Puerta del Sol plaza in the city centre. "This is not a war, it’s genocide,” They chanted.
"They are massacring us,” said Amira Sheikh-Ali, a 37-year-old of Palestinian origin.
"We’re in a situation when the Nakba is continuing in the middle of the 21st century,” she said, referring to the "catastrophe” word used by Palestinians to describe Israel’s illegal creation in 1948, when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven out.
"We want to ask Spain and the European authorities not to collaborate with Israel, because with their silence, they are collaborating,” said Ikhlass Abousousiane, a 25-year-old nurse of Moroccan origin.
The marches came amid the worst Israeli violence since a 2014 war in Gaza.
The bombardment began Monday, after Hamas fired rockets towards Jerusalem Al-Quds.
That was in response to bloody the Zionist regime’s police action at the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Al-Quds, as well as a crackdown on protests against the planned Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Al-Quds.
Iran’s foreign minister canceled a visit with his Austrian counterpart to show displeasure that Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s government had flown the Israeli flag in Vienna in a show of solidarity, the Austrian foreign ministry said on Saturday.
Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif was supposed to meet Alexander Schallenberg but had called off the trip, a spokeswoman for Schallenberg said, confirming a report in newspaper Die Presse.
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told ISNA news agency: "Mr Zarif did not consider the trip beneficial in these circumstances, and therefore the travel arrangements were not finalized.”
The dispute comes during talks in Vienna to try to revive a 2015 accord with western powers. Former U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, prompting Iran to scale back its compliance.
Kurz, who is firmly pro-Israel, had called flying the Zionist flag over the federal chancellery on Friday a mark of solidarity with the occupying regime. But Abbas Araqchi, who heads the Iranian delegation at the Vienna talks, criticized the move.
"Vienna is the seat of (nuclear watchdog) IAEA & UN, and (Austria) so far been a great host for negotiations,” Araqchi wrote on Twitter. "Shocking & painful to see flag of the occupying regime, that brutally killed tens of innocent civilians, inc many children in just few days, over govt offices in Vienna. We stand with Palestine.”
On Friday, a French court upheld a police ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the country as well as in the capital, Paris, with lawyers for the organizers
saying they would appeal the decision.
"We refuse to silence our solidarity with the Palestinians, and we will not be prevented from demonstrating,” the Association of Palestinians in the northern Ile-de-France region said shortly after the court ban was announced.
Earlier, representatives of the association told news media that France was "the only democratic country to forbid these demonstrations.”
The French interior ministry ordered police chiefs across the country to keep a close eye on planned demonstrations in support of Palestinians and ban them if necessary, as part of measures to bolster police protection of the Jewish community.
The lawyers for organizers of the rallies said they would appeal to France’s top administrative court, and called the police ban "disproportionate” and "politically motivated.”
Elsewhere in Europe, police in Denmark fired teargas and used batons to forcibly disperse pro-Palestinian activists in front of the Israeli embassy in the capital Copenhagen.
Media reports said several women and children were affected by the teargas, and that three protesters were arrested during the rally.
Also on Friday, police fired teargas to disperse a crowd of more than 200 people protesting in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, against the Israeli bombing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Several demonstrators were taken into custody.
Protesters waved banners with the Palestinian flag and with the words, "Kenyans stand with Palestine,” and "Our freedom is incomplete without the Freedom of Palestine.”
Zionist PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the regime’s foreign minister Gabi Ashkenazi have thanked their leadership counterparts in the U.S. and Europe for their support for Tel Aviv’s brutal aggression.
In the U.S., as many as 140 progressive groups called on President Joe Biden to uphold the stated principles of international law and condemn human rights violations against Palestinians.
In a joint statement, the groups urged the Biden administration to denounce efforts to evict Palestinian families in Jerusalem Al-Quds and "exert the utmost diplomatic pressure to prevent these potential war crimes from taking place.”
The statement, signed by prominent advocacy groups, cited the United Nations’ assessment that the displacement campaign in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood may constitute a war crime.
"This takes place in the broader context of Israel’s ongoing policy to forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes through eviction, home demolition, and displacement, with the express intent of pushing Palestinians out of Jerusalem in order to create and maintain a Jewish majority and supremacy in the city,” they said.
"We are horrified by Israel’s use of disproportionate and deadly force against Palestinians in Gaza which have already resulted in the killings of dozens of Palestinians, including children.”