Army Story 04-10

Jerusalem Compassed with Armies

Clearly this single prophetic event will take place with great swiftness. We will post stories of any troop movements in the Middle East and any stories relating to increased military power among the nations.

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Islamic states slam Gaza plan, urge UN presence in Mideast
By News Agencies

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on Thursday issued a declaration denouncing Israel's plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, saying it violates the internationally-brokered road map for peace.

Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia on Thursday urged U.S. President George W. Bush to reconsider his tacit recognition of some settlements in the West Bank.

The OIC statement also demanded that the United Nations play a key role in the territories as well as Iraq, saying that security in the region was increasingly unstable. It urged the UN Security Council to deploy a peacekeeping force in Gaza and the West Bank to monitor implementation of the road map.

"The situation in the region, especially in Palestine and in Iraq, has become extremely alarming," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi told an emergency meeting of the 57-state organization.

"The latest developments are threatening the stability and integrity of both, as well as the peace and security of its neighboring countries," he told the conference in Malaysia's administrative capital.

Badawi also denounced Israel's recent assassinations of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, saying the killings meant relations between Israelis and Palestinians had "never been more precarious."

The OIC declaration, however, did not call for sanctions against Israel, or for Islamic countries that have ties with Israel such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, to break relations - something the Palestinian delegation had been lobbying for.

Abdullah said Israel was guilty of state terrorism and Washington was in danger of losing its role of honest broker in that conflict. But he also condemned Palestinian suicide bombings as "unnecessary sacrifices of human lives."

Foreign ministers from Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Palestinian Authority are attending the one-day meeting. About a dozen others have sent junior ministers or other envoys.

Neither Egypt nor Jordan were at the OIC meeting.

In his letter to Bush, Qureia said recent U.S. declarations that Israel could keep some of the West Bank and would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees contradict long-standing U.S. policy.

In 1991, he wrote, the U.S. government stated that it "opposed unilateral actions that prejudge the outcome of permanent-status negotiations." Qureia said Bush is allowing Israel "to continue creating illegal facts on the ground" by expanding West Bank settlements.

Writing to Bush, Qureia also said that such conditions "can never make the Gaza evacuation a historic opportunity, but rather a prison."

But Bush on Wednesday rejected international condemnation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and said world leaders owed him a "thank you" for his plans for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Bush blasted the Palestinian leadership as having "failed the people, year after year after year" by not preventing terror attacks against Israelis.

Bush sparked a backlash in the Arab world last week by endorsing Israel's right to hold on to some West Bank settlements on land captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

He also said a right of return by Palestinian refugees to Israel was unrealistic, while backing a Gaza Strip pullout plan in a historic U.S. policy shift.

"Ariel Sharon came to America, and he stood up with me and he said, 'We are pulling out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank,'" Bush told a newspaper conference in Washington.

In "my judgment, the whole world should have said, 'Thank you, Ariel. Now we have a chance to begin the construction of a peaceful Palestinian state,'" Bush added.

Lamenting the response to Sharon's initiatives, Bush said: "Yes, there was kind of silence, wasn't there? Because the responsibility is hard."

Bush's support for Sharon may have gone over well with conservative and Jewish voters in the U.S. presidential election, but it inflamed the Arab world.

This week, Jordan's King Abdullah abruptly postponed a scheduled meeting with Bush at the White House because of concerns over the U.S. stance on the peace process.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in comments published on Tuesday, warned that Arabs in the Middle East hate the United States more than ever following the invasion of Iraq and Israel's assassination of Hamas leaders.

Source

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