A Palestinian plane carrying eight people injured in clashes with Israeli troops stopped over Sunday in Jordan on its way to Baghdad, a Palestinian diplomat told AFP.
"The plane is preparing now for take off after a brief stopover during which it embarked members of the Palestine National Council and the Palestinian ambassador to Baghdad Azzam al-Ahmad," Attalah Khairy said.
"We are bidding the plane farewell now and the Iraqi and Palestinian ambassadors in Amman are also seeing it off," he added.
The flight, the first between the Palestinian autonomous territory in Gaza and Baghdad, carried to Iraq representatives of professional organizations and unions, an AFP journalist at the Gaza International Airport reported.
Arab countries spearheaded by Jordan have opened up their hospitals to the critically injured as Palestinian hospitals can no longer cope with the flow.
It is the latest flight to defy the 10-year-old UN air embargo on Iraq since Jordan sent the first Arab humanitarian plane to Baghdad in September following flights from Russia and France.
Both Moscow and Paris argue that the ban does not concern private commercial flights which do not need a formal UN authorization while Washington and Britain consider them a flagrant violation of the UN sanctions imposed on Baghdad after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
More than 140 people, most of them Arabs, have been killed in the violence that has rocked the Palestinian territories since September 28 and thousands injured – AMMAN (AFP)
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