World

Israel’s Netanyahu calls Morocco deal ‘another great light of peace’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed President Donald Trump’s announcement of a normalization deal between Israel and Morocco as an “historic peace between us.”

Netanyahu said it would lead to direct flights between Morocco and Israel and that the fourth US-brokered deal between Israel and an Arab country in recent months would be a “very warm peace.”

In a televised address, he said: “I’ve always believed that this historic peace would come. I’ve always worked for it.”

Thanking Trump, he added: “I want to thank, too, the king of Morocco, King Mohammed the Sixth, for taking this historic decision to bring an historic peace between us.”

But Bassam as-Salhi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, condemned the deal, as Palestinian officials did with the earlier Israeli normalization accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

“Any Arab retreat from the (2002) Arab peace initiative, which stipulates that normalization comes only after Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands, is unacceptable and increases Israel’s belligerence and its denial of the Palestinian people’s rights,” Salhi told Reuters.

In Gaza, Hazem Qassem, spokesman for the ruling Islamist group Hamas, said: “This is a sin and it doesn’t serve the Palestinian people. The Israeli occupation uses every new normalization to increase its aggression against the Palestinian people and increase its settlement expansion.”

(Reuters)