Muslim countries hold summit over Jerusalem

ISTANBUL - Leaders and senior officials from Muslim countries called on the world to recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

The leaders held an extraordinary summit on Wednesday in Istanbul, Turkey, in response to a US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said his people will not accept any role for Washington in the Middle East peace process "from now on".

Abbas called US President Donald Trump's decision a "crime" that threatened world peace. He called on the United Nations to take charge of the peace process and create a new mechanism.

"The US has lost its mediator role in the Israel-Palestine peace process, and we will never allow in the future that the US takes part in the process," Abbas said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the extraordinary session of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as the organization's term-president to produce a unified Islamic position.

The Turkish leader has been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump's decision which also includes starting immediately the process of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

"The US decision... means punishing Palestinians who have proved numerous times that they side with peace instead of violence," Erdogan said.

Israel took over East Jerusalem, revered by Muslims as the third holiest site in Islam, in the 1967 war, and declared unilaterally the whole city as its eternal capital.

However, this move has never been accepted by the international community, which has called for reaching a final settlement of the dispute through Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Second largest bloc

Most OIC members attended the meeting, including the Iranian president, the Lebanese president and the Jordanian king.

The OIC is the second largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents.

Trump's announcement over the contested city has sparked days of violent clashes in Gaza Strip and West Bank as well as protests in other Arab countries. Several rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel over the past few days.

According to a health official in Gaza, clashes between Palestinian young protesters and Israeli soldiers continued on Tuesday at the border areas between Gaza and Israel, with five moderately injured by live bullets so far.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Tuesday the US embassy in Israel was unlikely to be moved to Jerusalem before 2020, media reported.

"It's not going to be anything that happens right away," The New York Times reported, quoting Tillerson's speech at the State Department on Tuesday.

Xinhua - Ap

(China Daily 12/14/2017 page11)