Yum al-Quds (Quds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem) has usually been held on the last Friday of Ramadan since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in protest of Israel’s 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem.
This year’s parade in Tehran was attended by a number of state leaders, including President Ebrahim Raisi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament. In the latter’s speech, he said that the root of the region’s problems is Israel, and that it is the Palestinian fighters who are obstructing Israel’s plans.
On Thursday, the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces said, in a statement related to the event of the next day, that the external “Islamic resistance” against Israel and the internal demonstrations “shake the nature of the Zionist entity” and that the “countdown to the collapse of Zionism has begun.”
Protesters marched in Tehran from ten different locations, and the movement ended on the campus of Tehran University with Friday noon prayers. State television also reported several rural demonstrations in which participants raised Palestinian flags or the symbol of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah. The American and Israeli flags were also burned in some places.
On this day, for the first time, the Iranian president directly addressed the residents of the Gaza Strip via a video link. Hundreds of members of the radical Islamic movement Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territories, and the extremist Islamic Jihad movement watched and heard Al-Rizi’s speech in a stadium in Gaza.
The Iranian leader encouraged the Palestinians to continue their struggle, but used a harsh tone against the Palestinian Authority, which controls the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank.
Recently held several meetings with the Israeli side in Jordan and Egypt to reduce tensions.
Al-Rizi stressed that “the issue of self-determination is now in the hands of the Palestinian fighters.” At the Gaza event, Yahya Sinfar, the leader of Hamas, spoke with appreciation of the fact that extremists fired rockets into Israeli territory from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and from Syria. As he said, this was in response to the action of the Israeli police on the Temple Mount.
Cover image: Getty Images
