Ebrahim Raisi, the President of Iran, has called on Islamic and Arab nations to cooperate in facing Israel as it wages a deadly war initiated by a shock attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Hamas’s weekend attack spotted hundreds of fighters cross the Israeli border in vehicles, by air, and by sea, killing 1,200 people and taking 150 hostages.
Around another 1,200 people have been killed in thousands of Israeli strikes on Gaza, while a “complete siege” has been levied on the needy Palestinian enclave of over 2.4 million people.
Late Wednesday, Raisi told his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad in a phone call, “Today, all the Islamic and Arab countries and all the free people of the world must reach a serious convergence and cooperation in the path of stopping the crimes of the Zionist regime against the oppressed Palestinian nation.”
Raisi said that to prevent the “genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionists,” Iran will coordinate with Islamic nations “as soon as possible,” the Iranian presidency website said on Thursday.
Iran on Saturday celebrated the attack in Israel, though it urged it was not involved in it.
During his call with Assad, Raisi also lashed out at Arab nations that have recently normalized or are in conversation to establish ties with Israel.
Raisi said, “Today, all those who made public their relations with the Zionist regime under the pretext of defending the rights of the Palestinians were disgraced, and it has been proven to the whole world that the Zionist regime is in its weakest state.”
Assad similarly highlighted during the call the “necessity of rapid action at the Arab and Islamic levels to protect the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, and to prevent the Israeli attacks targeting children and women.”
