Arab world, including Israel’s peace partners, react to Israeli strikes in Gaza

Arab countries, including those who have peace deals with Jerusalem, slam Israel for Gaza airstrikes that killed senior terrorists.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Countries throughout the Arab world, including those who have signed peace agreements with Israel, condemned IAF airstrikes that killed three senior Islamic Jihad commanders, along with 10 other people, in the Gaza Strip overnight Tuesday.

Qatar, a major patron of Hamas that is believed to provide millions of dollars in funding each year to the terror group, framed Israel’s targeting of terrorists as a human rights violation.

The Gulf Kingdom called the bombings “a new episode in the series of horrific occupation crimes against the defenseless Palestinian people, especially women and children,” without mentioning the more than 100 rockets fired at Israel by Gaza-based terror groups last week.

The country placed the blame for rising tensions squarely on Jerusalem, bemoaning the “fading chances of peace and the widening of the cycle of violence due to the provocative Israeli escalation.”

The United Arab Emirates, which inked the Abraham Accords normalization agreement with Israel in 2020, rushed to condemn the “Israeli operation that targeted areas in the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the death and injury of numerous people.”

The statement, from the UAE Foreign Ministry, did not place any responsibility on terror groups for firing a volley of rockets at communities in southern Israel last week, and instead demanding “Israeli authorities to halt escalation and avoid exacerbating tension and instability in the region.”

Jordan, another Arab nation that signed a peace deal with Israel, slammed Jerusalem for the airstrikes.

A spokesman for the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said the bombings illustrated “the need for the international community to move immediately and effectively to stop this aggression, and to provide protection for the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and in all the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Egypt stressed that the airstrikes “are inconsistent with the rules of international law,” but did not mention in its statement that the indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli civilians in communities bordering the Strip is a war crime.

Palestinian Authority officials released statements which failed to acknowledge that the targets of the bombings were terror leaders, instead falsely claiming that all those killed in the airstrikes were civilians.

“We condemn this dangerous Israeli escalation against our people, which targeted children, women, and homes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, the latest of which was the killing of 13 civilians, including women and children, in the Gaza Strip, and the injury of 13 people from bullets in Nablus, in addition to the ongoing storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque,” said PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

Echoing that falsehood, Abbas’ spiritual adviser Mahmoud Al-Habbash condemned the airstrikes, saying that all those who died were civilians.

“We hold the Israeli government fully responsible for this dangerous escalation that drags the region into the square of violence, tension and instability.”

PA President Mohammed Shtayyeh said that the “aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip is organized state terrorism and an attempt to export the internal crisis that the government of extremism in Israel suffers from… a practical translation of the doctrine of killing, incineration, and genocide, which those in power in Israel have long professed… [it is] an extension of the Nakba (catastrophe) that befell our people in 1948.”