Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's special envoy to the UAE, Mohammad-Hossein Saffar Harandi, said in Dubai on January 12 that Ahmadinejad's plan for Islamic heads of state to improve the status of the Palestinian nation was supported by UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.
Saffar Harandi, who is also Iranian Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister, was visiting the UAE to deliver Ahmadinejad's plan to Sheikh Zayed.
He told the official Iranian news agency IRNA in Abu Dhabi: "Iran's president has proposed to the Islamic heads of states to take an immediate step aimed at improving the status of the Palestinians who are under invasion by the Zionist regime's armed forces."
He said that "Sheikh Zayed responded positively to his Iranian counterpart's proposed plan, and promised to back it up," adding, "In his message to the heads of the Arab and Islamic countries, President Ahmadinejad stressed that their support is needed in order to change the current situation in Gaza."
Saffar Harandi went on to say, "It seems as if the ongoing conditions in Gaza are a great test, both for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian combatant groups... This test for the patient, resistant, and epic-maker people of Palestine is meanwhile proof of their strength in resistance. Fortunately, so far both Gaza residents and Hamas, as well as the Islamic Jihad movement, have emerged prosperous from this tough test."
He continued, "This war is meanwhile a test for the Islamic and Arab countries, since it is a real scene of confrontation between the Zionist enemy on the one side and a part of the Islamic world on the other side, where our Palestinian brethren are fighting and resisting manly, so the Arab and Islamic world leaders should stand up to their mottos regarding the unified Arabic and Islamic Ummah."
He emphasized, "Save for a few countries the rest have failed in this fatal test."
He concluded by saying, "If [only] there were a way to dispatch volunteers for fighting in Gaza against the usurper Zionists, or to forward medical and foodstuff aid there," and expressed certainty that the supporters of Israel who paved the path for the notorious acts of that usurper regime would soon feel sorry for the continuation of their support for that brutal regime.
Source: IRNA, Iran, January 12, 2009
