Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has complained to the United Nations of Israel's "barefaced aggression" against the Palestinians and demanded the Jewish state comply with UN resolutions.
"The Palestinian people need the solidarity of the global community more than ever, to support their resistance to Israel's unjustified military force," Mubarak said in a letter to a UN committee on Palestinian rights published by the state-run MENA news agency.
The Egyptian leader bemoaned "the continuing deterioration" of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories "during which the Palestinian people have been exposed to two months of barefaced aggression."
Nearly 300 people have been killed, the vast majority of them Palestinians, since the current wave of violence broke out at the end of September.
He warned in the letter, delivered to UN chief Kofi Annan, that Palestinian "desperation and frustration" was growing due to the deadlocked peace process, continuation of Jewish settlement building and Israel's failure to implement international resolutions.
"We remain firmly convinced that a just and comprehensive peace will not be reached without Israel submitting to ... United Nations resolutions" which call for its withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Mubarak also repeated calls for a withdrawal of Israeli troops to the positions they occupied before the current violence erupted, and for the UN Security Council to consider sending a protection force to the area.
"Reviving and rebuilding the peace process is a fundamental goal for Egypt," Mubarak said in the letter, which he wrote on the occasion of the world day of Palestinian solidarity on Wednesday – CAIRO (AFP)
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