US Embassy Transfer to Jerusalem May Trigger Violence in Mideast – Fatah

MOSCO (Sputnik) — In September, US President-elect Donald Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his administration would recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and move the US embassy there.

“In order to continue the Palestinian process and to implement historical rights of Palestinians as well as to avoid a new round of violence [in the Middle East] as the Palestinian Arabs and Muslims around the world will never accept the accession of Jerusalem to the Israeli territory, it is necessary to prevent the relocation [of the US embassy],” Ahmad said at a press conference in Moscow.

One of the Fatah movement leaders stressed that the international community and organizations had not recognized the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967, adding that no state, including the United States, had opened its embassy there.

Ahmad, who arrived in Moscow to participate in January 15-17 informal intra-Palestinian talks under auspices of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the committee asked Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to raise this issue with the US authorities and had discussed with the minister the risks of transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem and its consequences for the peace process.

Fatah was the dominating party in Palestine until Hamas arose as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation in 1987. In 2007, a deadly conflict between Fatah and Hamas led to the split of the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinians want to create an independent state on the territories of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, partially occupied by Israel, and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.