CAIRO: More demonstrations were held Tuesday to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Organized by the Journalists’ Syndicate and held on the steps of its downtown headquarters, some 60 demonstrators called for the opening of the Rafah crossing and for visiting Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to leave Egypt.
“This is a protest on behalf of 75 million Egyptians who refuse normalization with the Zionist enemy, head of the Journalists’ Syndicate Freedoms Committee Mohamed Abdel Wahab said.
“Mubarak’s regime has betrayed the Palestinian people, he added.
El-Araby editor Nour El-Hoda Zaky condemned what she termed acts of genocide in Gaza.
“What is happening at the moment in Gaza is the same holocaust which happened to the Jews, she said. “This isn’t just a war between an occupier and an occupied people.
Zaky condemned Egyptian foreign policy which she said has “changed the enemy from the Zionist to the Palestinian people.
Labor Party Secretary General Magdy Hassan echoed the same ideas. He condemned the failure of the Egyptian authorities to fully open the border with Gaza and blamed 11 fatalities on state security interference in the admission of Palestinian casualties to hospitals in Al-Arish.
“What has state security got to do with hospitals? If these Palestinians had been anywhere else in Egypt, state security would not have interfered, Hassan said.
Hassan called President Hosni Mobarak “a civil servant (mowazzaf) of Condoleeza Rice.
He also urged the Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing.
“You feed Jews with natural gas but won’t open the border to send in food and medicine to Gaza, he said.
After the protest, Zaky spoke to Daily News Egypt, saying that she had come to the protest because she rejects Israeli aggression in Gaza.
“Palestinians are our brothers, we’re one people. The Egyptian president must open the Rafah crossing to send in aid, she said.
Zaky also said that today’s protest formed part of a string of daily protests which will be held until the current crisis in Gaza ends.
It was announced after the protest that a symbolic funeral procession will be held tomorrow, which will go from the headquarters of the Nasserite Party to the Arab League building in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square.
