CAIRO, (Islamweb & News Agencies) -Top Arab diplomats on Monday condemned as "racist" Israel's alleged moves to tighten its grip on Arab east Jerusalem, while they renewed calls for international support for the Palestinians.(Read photo caption below)
Foreign ministers and other envoys from the 22-member Arab League ended two days of meetings in Cairo by adopting pro-Palestinian resolutions that the international community is unable or unwilling to implement.
They also toughened an earlier statement condemning Israel's attempts to "besiege" Arab east Jerusalem and "isolate" it from Palestinians in the West Bank, saying the policy was "racist."
The ministers said Israel has isolated the Palestinians by setting up "military buffer zones between the city and the surrounding villages, increasing the military presence and digging trenches around it."
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who was absent from the regular biannual Arab League meeting, has appealed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to intervene urgently against Israeli moves to militarily seal off Jerusalem, aides said.
Israel says Jerusalem is its "eternal and undivided" capital after seizing the eastern sector from Jordanian control in the 1967 Middle East war, a claim never recognised by the international community.
On Wednesday, Israeli troops reinforced security around Jerusalem and its border with the West Bank with more than 1,000 military and police reinforcements deployed inside the city and roadblocks set up around its perimeter.
The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
The ministers also adopted a resolution repeating an "appeal to the international community to fulfill its responsibilities to protect Palestinians by sending international observers."
At a special meeting here in July, Arab foreign ministers urged the Group of Eight leading industrial countries meeting in Italy to send international observers to observe a tattered June 13 Israeli-Palestinian truce.
The G8 said observers should be deployed to monitor the truce, the first step in the Mitchell peace plan, but only if both sides agreed. The Palestinian side has backed the proposal, but Israel has rejected it.
The ministers also reiterated calls to the UN Security Council to "create an international committee to investigate massacres committed by Israel," hoping for a war crimes tribunal like that on the former Yugoslavia.
Nearly all the demands in the draft resolution document have already been raised by the Arab League.
One resolution "reaffirms support for the Palestinian position of holding on to sovereignty over Jerusalem, including the Haram al-Sherif," the main Muslim holy site in the city.
Another repeated Arab threats to sever ties with any country recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or moving its embassy there from Tel Aviv, recalling that a UN resolution urges countries not to do so.
Still another called for the Palestinians right to return to homes they lost when Israel was created in 1948.
Around 500 supporters of the Palestinians shouted anti-Israeli slogans and burned the US and Israeli flags during a protest in Cairo, near the American embassy and the Arab League headquarters.
Some protestors had said they planned to march to the US embassy, but riot police contained the protest at a nearby administrative building.
PHOTO CAPTION:
A general view of the Arab foreign ministers bi-annual meeting at the Arab league headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Sept. 9, 2001. The proposed talks between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres were expected to dominate the meeting of the Arab League. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
- Sep 09 7:34 AM ET