Morocco king orders aid to be sent to Palestinian territories

King Mohammed VI gives his instructions to send 40 tonnes of emergency humanitarian aid to Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza Strip.

RABAT – Morocco’s King Mohammed VI and Chairman of the Al-Quds Committee, ordered Friday an emergency humanitarian aid to be sent to Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, said the Foreign Ministry.

The latest outburst of violence began in Jerusalem and has spread across the region, with Jewish-Arab clashes and rioting in mixed cities of Israel. There were also widespread Palestinian protests Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.

Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which has pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes. In Gaza, at least 126 people have been killed, including 31 children and 20 women; in Israel, seven people have been killed, including a 6-year-old boy and a soldier.

Rocket fire from Gaza and Israel’s bombardment of the blockaded Palestinian territory continued into early Saturday, when an airstrike on a three-story house in a refugee camp in Gaza City killed eight children and two women from an extended family — the highest number of fatalities in a single hit.

This humanitarian aid, consisting of 40 tonnes, is made up of basic food products, emergency medicine and blankets, Morocco’s Foreign Ministry said in a press release, stressing that the humanitarian aid will be airlifted by aircraft of the Royal Armed Forces.

“The decision of HM King Mohammed VI, Chairman of the Al-Quds Committee, is part of the Kingdom's continued support for the just Palestinian cause and its permanent solidarity with the brotherly Palestinian people,” it added.

Morocco had denounced, in the strongest terms, the violence perpetrated in the occupied Palestinian territories, and whose continuation only leads to widening the gap, reinforcing resentment and reducing all the chances of peace in the region.

The spiraling violence has raised fears of a new Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising at a time when there have been no peace talks in years. Palestinians were set to mark Nakba day Saturday, when they commemorate the estimated 700,000 people who fled or were driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation, raising the possibility of more unrest.

Morocco, which places the Palestinian cause at the top of its concerns, remains faithful to its attachment to the achievement of the two-state solution, living side by side in peace and security, through the creation of a Palestinian state within the borders of June 4, 1967, with Eastern Jerusalem as its capital.