Arab League holds emergency meeting in Egypt with Palestine and Syria on the agenda

An Arab League summit, urgently called about two weeks ago, will take place this Thursday in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and will allow the member countries to discuss developments in the Palestinian territories. In a statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that the summit is being coordinated by Bahrain, the current president of the Arab League.

The decision to hold the summit comes “after consultations and coordination by Egypt at the highest levels with Arab countries, including the State of Palestine, which requested the summit, “in order to address the latest critical developments regarding the Palestinian cause,” the statement said. On the table are increasingly insistent statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the President of the United States that the Palestinians should establish a state outside Palestine – and have even suggested Saudi Arabia for this purpose. The Saudis, who clearly do not support any such decision, complained that the statements are an example of the lack of any notion of Palestinian sovereignty.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump said Washington would “take over” Gaza and move Palestinians elsewhere under an extraordinary reconstruction plan that he said could transform the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The proposal was met with widespread condemnation across most of the world — at least those who took the time to listen to it.

The meeting should also serve to discuss the situation in Syria, at least as regards the attacks that the country, recently freed from the regime of Bashar al-Assad, has also been the target of on the part of Israel.

On Wednesday, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that the Israeli airstrikes on Syria are a “provocative escalation” and warned that Tel Aviv, the capital of Israel, is trying to exploit the transition in the country to impose an “illegal and illegitimate reality”. In a statement, Aboul Gheit described the attacks on al-Kiswah, in the interior of Damascus, and Izraa, in Daraa, in the south of the country, on Tuesday night, as “a reckless provocative escalation that tries to take advantage of the Syrian transition”.

“The Israeli occupation of any Syrian land is a violation of international law,” he reaffirmed, calling on foreign countries to take a clear position against “this unjustified aggression, which seeks to inflame regional tensions and obstruct the political transition process in Syria.” Aboul Gheit reiterated the Arab League’s “solidarity” with Syria in the face of Israel’s hostile actions, including “scandalous attempts to sow discord.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the offensive, threatening the Syrian army: “Whoever tries to establish themselves in the security zone in southern Syria will be met with fire.” Days earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu demanded the “demilitarization” of southern Syria, specifically on the Arab side, stating that Zionist troops would remain in the territory “indefinitely.”

It should be recalled that, immediately after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime last December, the Israeli army expanded its occupation of the Golan Heights to the neutral zone agreed in 1974. The United Nations itself joined the Arab countries in condemning the Hebrew state's decision.