South Africa hosts an international conference against Israeli apartheid

The International Conference against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine was scheduled to start today Friday in the City of Johannesburg in South Africa and will continue its activities until May 12 this year.

South Africa hosts an international conference against Israeli apartheid

This is the first international meeting that wants to start an international movement to dismantle the system of colonialism and apartheid of Israel, and it is attended by more than 200 religious, political leaders and heads of groups and parties from different parts of the world.

The meeting is taking place while Israel continues the genocide against the Palestinian citizens of the Gaza Strip since the seventh of October last year, which has so far killed nearly 35,000 Palestinian citizens, most of them children and women, as well as injuring approximately 79,000 others.

The meeting was scheduled to open with a speech by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Naledi Pandor, who in earlier reports condemned Israel's aggression against Gaza, and threatened to arrest the citizens of his country who serve in the army of the hostile regime if they will return to that country. 

In this context, the president of the meeting, Frank Chikane has said - in his message on the website of the meeting that: "The Palestinian people are facing the genocidal attacks of the apartheid regime of Israel on an unprecedented scale."

He wrote that: The international anti-apartheid conference is intended to look in depth at the Palestinian crisis and jointly prepare strategies to end the genocide in Gaza, stop the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land and let the Palestinians exercise their right to self-determination. 

Chikane said - in an earlier interview with Qatar's Al Jazeera television - that "what I see in Palestine is worse than the apartheid policy that ruled South Africa. The Israeli regime is doing worse things against the Palestinians than what was witnessed during the administration of apartheid in South Africa."

The statement issued by the leadership committee of the meeting said, this meeting aims to mobilize the international movement against racism in order to hold Israel responsible for the crimes of racism it commits against the Palestinians, and to work to eradicate the apartheid regime of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

It is good to remind here that South Africa, which went through a difficult period of torture and harassment by the white colonial rule, has been at the forefront of defending Palestinians who are brutally killed in the Gaza Strip.