The expected and planned “Day of Rage” carried across parts of Gaza and parts of Jerusalem this weekend. Early reports have the Palestinians suffering two dead and hundreds wounded in clashes with Israeli police. The outbreak of violence supposedly stemmed from the decision of President Trump to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
The Red Crescent Society said that they treated 331 people for gunshot wounds, 13 from live bullets and the rest from tear gas and rubber bullets in violence across the West Bank and Gaza.
The protests come at a time of heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the wake of Trump’s announcement, which broke with decades of U.S. foreign policy as well as international law and spurred almost worldwide condemnation.
“The project of transforming Jerusalem into the occupation’s capital will not pass,” Hamas said in a statement released Thursday to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1987 intifada.
Israel, which annexed East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, claims that the city cannot be divided and is its capital. But peace talks have centered on the idea that East Jerusalem, which is dominated by Arabs despite a rising number of Israeli settlements, would be the capital of any future Palestinian state.
The U.S. position has been that Jerusalem’s final status should be determined through negotiations, a position that Trump said was not being abandoned.
Trump’s action, which he still put off for the next six months is hardly the reason that Hamas and its bosses in Tehran are calling for intifada. That in itself is a fundamental problem, Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinian people but the Tehran government, who use the population as a pawn. As for the embassy move being a roadblock for peace? It hasn’t been moved in the last 20 years since the US government originally voted to move it. And there has been no peace.
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