PLO Official Urges for Halting Israeli Attacks on PalestiniansA senior official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Friday in Tunis called on international community to adopt firm and effective measures to stop the continuous Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people.Farouk Al Kadoumy, director of the political department of PLO, made the appeal during his meetings with Asian, African, Latin American and Canadian ambassadors to Tunisia at the PLO headquarters here. The Israeli aggressions against the Palestinians reached its peak with the missile attacks on Palestinian security and civilian targets on Thursday afternoon, he told the ambassadors. The airstrikes against Palestinian targets in the West Bank city of Ramallah and Gaza City constitute a grave escalation of tension in the region and defiance of the international public opinions, he said. He accused Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak of undermining the peace process which was pushed to the brink of collapse by two weeks of bloody clashes between Israeli forces and the Palestinians. "All Barak's acts since his assumption of power (in July last year) till the recent air raids killed the peace process," he said. He urged U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process -- the United States and Russia --to do more to salvage the dying peace process. He also asked the ambassadors to inform their respective governments of the necessity to back the Palestinian demands: withdrawal of the Israeli troops from the Palestinian self-rule areas, the formation of an international fact-finding committee on the Israeli atrocities, lifting the closure imposed on the Palestinian territories, the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions 343 and 228, the deployment of U.N. peace-keeping forces, and holding an emergency U.N. Security Council session on the Israeli practices. |
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