Not even nuclear weapons can break Palestinians’ resolve: Zarif

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif asserts that the Palestinian people’s decades-long resistance against Israel and its main backer, the United States, testifies well to the strength of their resolve.

“The resistance of the Palestinian people has continued for [more than] 70 years, and has shown that aggression, violations of international law, and even nuclear weapons cannot end the national aspirations of an entire people,” he said on Friday, addressing a webinar attended by domestic and international officials and personalities in commemoration of the International Quds Day.

Every year, millions of pro-Palestinian people demonstrate across the world on the last Friday of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, heeding a call by the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, who designated the day as the International Quds Day as an occasion for worldwide declaration of support for Palestinians in the face of the US-backed Israeli regime.

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Zarif hailed the Quds Day as an occasion that is honored worldwide by all those “who believe in the cause of Palestine, in the necessity of ending Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, in ending the most severe case of violation of human rights, (and) the most severe case of threat against international peace and security.”

The illegal regime claimed existence in 1948 after expelling hundreds of Palestinians from their land during a Western-backed war. The regime occupied more Palestinian and other territories during another war in 1967 and has ever since been dotting the lands with illegal settlements.

The West, at the head of them the US, has also been invariably supporting the Israeli regime in its daily acts of aggression against the Palestinians and trying to shield Tel Aviv in the face of all international punitive measures.

Owing to the unreserved patronage, Tel Aviv has also turned itself into the sole owner of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, something that has been verified by numerous high-profile international figures and media reports.

Accordingly, Zarif called Israel “the most serious threat to respect for human rights, to global peace and security, to nonproliferation, (and) to a world free from weapons of mass destruction that has ever existed.”

US accomplice to all Israeli crimes

The top diplomat said the US’s successive administrations, especially the current one, were “accomplice” to all of Israel’s atrocities targeting the Palestinian people.

Donald Trump’s administration with its hugely controversial pro-Israeli scheme -- that the US president has called “the deal of century” -- has shown that those who believe that the US can be a broker for peace “were badly mistaken,” Zarif stated.

The scheme endorses Washington’s brazen recognition under Trump of the holy occupied city of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s “undivided capital.” It also allows Tel Aviv to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, where al-Quds is located, and the Jordan Valley.

Zarif said, “This administration has reminded those Muslim governments, who continued to rely on the United States and even today disgracefully cooperate with Israel against other Muslim countries, that this is a dead end.”

He was referring to certain Arab states’ enhanced cooperation and engagement with the incumbent US administration and their widely-reported attempts at “normalization” with Israel.

However, the new coronavirus pandemic that has come to threaten all since late last year has shown that the global powers supporting Israel “are not omnipotent, are not above all, [and that] their power can be undermined even by a small virus,” the top diplomat observed.

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