TEHRAN – Iran’s Foreign Ministry has urged the world to stand up for the Palestinians’ rights.

“Today is the Day of Catastrophe (or #NakbaDay) after the Zionists’ occupation of the lands of Palestinians, led to their mass exodus since 1948. The world must stand up for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, as this long overdue right is recognized globally,” the Foreign Ministry said in a tweet on Thursday.

Israeli-American activist and author Miko Peled has told the Tehran Times that “Israel is an apartheid regime” which “has been involved in genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” 

The Foreign Ministry also issued a statement on Thursday calling on the international community to take effective action to support Palestinians’ struggles to liberate their land.

“During more than seven decades of occupation, the Zionist regime began its acts of aggression with war and crime against the real owners of this land and then continued this policy with building settlements (deep into occupied territories), displacing Palestinians, desecrating al-Aqsa Mosque, Judaizing al-Quds and the West Bank, continuing the blockade of Gaza, illegally annexing the occupied Golan (Heights) and attempting to grab major parts of the West Bank,” said the statement, according to Tasnim news agency.

The statement expressed Iran’s support for the Palestinian cause, calling on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), governments, Islamic countries, and all freedom-seeking nations around the world to help end Israeli occupation and aggression and restore the Palestinian people’s rights.

Nakba day, meaning ‘Day of the Catastrophe’, is observed on 15 May every year.

In 1948, the Zionist regime forced 760,000 Palestinians out of their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighboring Arab states as well as to many other countries in the world, and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines at the war’s conclusion and those internally displaced, were barred by Israel from returning to their homes or reclaiming their property. This dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as al-Nakba, meaning “the catastrophe,” or “the disaster.”

NA/PA