Last update - 00:00 28/11/2007
Iran: 'True owners of Palestine' absent at Annapolis conference
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent
The Annapolis conference was a "bargaining session" at which the real stakeholders were not even present, an Iranian government spokesman said Tuesday.
"The conference is taking place in the absence of the true owners of Palestine," said Gholam-Hossein Elham, according to the Iranian news agency IRNA.
Elham added that leaders of the Palestinian factions opposed to Annapolis would meet in Iran in another 10 days. "Iran is the home of all the fighting Palestinian factions who aspire to liberate their land from the grip of the thieving occupier," he said.
It is not clear whether this meeting will be in addition to or in place of a meeting of Palestinian rejectionist groups that had originally been slated to take place in Damascus. That meeting, supposed to be Tuesday, was postponed, and Hamas rejected an Iranian offer to host it in Tehran.
Meanwhile, speaking at the largest protest in Hamas-run Gaza, leaders of the Islamist group which seized the enclave from Abbas' forces in June said he had no right to make concessions to Israel at the conference.
"Let them go to a thousand conferences, we say in the name of the Palestinian people that we did not authorize anyone to sign any agreement that harms our rights," Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader, told a cheering crowd.
"Anyone who does so will be judged by history as a traitor."
Speaking to the Tuesday rally, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said his group would not disarm. "We will stand firmly in the face of policies that attack the will of our people, our factions and our weapons of resistance, Haniyeh said. We reaffirm the legitimacy of resistance and support it as a natural right."
Haniyeh also expressed dismay over the participation of 16 Arab nations,
including Saudi Arabia and Syria, a key Hamas patron, at the U.S. summit.
He said the Arab masses "will reject ... any concessions to the Zionist enemy.
"We are sure that the Annapolis conference will not change the reality of
history and geography, he added. Any conference that goes beyond this reality is doomed to failure."
After Haniyeh's speech, the Gaza protest gained strength, beginning with
several thousand pro-Hamas university students and quickly growing into tens of thousands of people.
"History will have no mercy on you," the crowd shouted in a reference to Abbas.
Waving Palestinian flags as well as the green Hamas banner and black flag of the Islamic Jihad faction, protesters shouted "Abbas is a traitor."
Islamic Jihad officials did not spare their criticism either. The organizations's chairman Ramadan Abdullah Shalah said that "the Annapolis summit is an Arab-Zionist celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary. It strives to destroy the Palestinian struggle with the blessing of the Arab world and especially of the Saudis."
"There will be no concessions over one inch of Palestine. We will defend this land by our flesh and we will water it by our blood," Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed al-Hindi told the rally.
In Lebanon, several hundred Palestinians protested at the Ain al-Hilweh camp, home to 70,000 refugees, chanting "Overthrow the Arab traitors," in reference to Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Syria which are attending the conference.
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