Moroccan parties reject Macron's Parliament remarks on Hamas and Israel

The Justice and Development Party (PJD) sent an open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the letter, signed by the party's Secretary General, Abdelilah Benkirane, the party expressed its «great satisfaction with your speech regarding the historical relations of friendship and mutual respect between Morocco and France, as well as the promising prospects opened by this visit».

However, the party expressed its «surprise at the content of your speech on Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza, particularly your assertion that ‘October 7, 2023, constituted a particularly barbaric and terrible attack perpetrated by Hamas against Israel and its people, and that Israel has the right to defend its people against such a threat...’»

«Hamas, like the National Liberation Movement in Morocco, the Free French Forces in France, the National Liberation Front in Algeria, and many liberation movements around the world, was and will remain a resistance movement exercising its legitimate right, recognized by international law, for all peoples to defend themselves and their land against occupation and annihilation», he continued.

«Hamas and all Palestinian resistance factions are rightly resisting colonialism, occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the barbaric operations committed by Israel, which did not begin on October 7, 2023, but long before and have continued uninterrupted for more than 76 years», he added.

The party explained that Israel’s actions «as a settler entity that illegally occupies the land of Palestine have nothing to do with the right to self-defense, and that the crimes committed by Israel for decades, particularly the brutal genocide since October 7, 2023, and the ‘generals’ plan that has been ongoing in northern Gaza for weeks, are unparalleled in the history of brutality».

«Your characterization of these atrocities as 'the right to self-defense against such a threat...' constitutes a great injustice and an outrageous insult to the Palestinian people oppressed since at least 1948, as well as to the hundreds of thousands of civilian women and children annihilated or maimed by the Israeli army since October 7, 2023. This serves as encouragement and a license for the barbaric occupying army to continue this ethnic cleansing and these unprecedented massacres».

For her part, Fatima Tamni, a parliamentarian for the Democratic Left Federation, issued a statement saying, «As a parliamentarian for the Democratic Left Federation, I condemn in the strongest terms the statements made by the French president inside the Moroccan parliament, where he described the Palestinian resistance as terrorism».

She continued, «This rejected statement reveals the blatant hypocrisy of the French state, which claims to defend democracy and human rights while continuing to support and arm the Zionist entity that practices the worst forms of terrorism and crimes against the Palestinian people».