Palestinians stage a protest against Israeli raid on the main office of the official news agency Wafa in Ramallah, West Bank, yesterday.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) yesterday condemned an Israeli raid on the main office of the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
On Monday, Israeli forces broke into the agency’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah on claims of searching for suspects in a shooting attack that injured six Israelis on Sunday.
During the raid, Israeli soldiers reportedly held journalists working in the office inside a room in the building.
In a statement, the OIC’s Secretariat decried the Israeli raid and the “use of the agency’s headquarters to target Palestinian citizens”. The pan-Islamic grouping called on the international community to “intervene to hold Israel accountable for its crimes and violations against Palestinian journalists and media institutions.”
Earlier yesterday, scores of Palestinians demonstrated in Ramallah in protest of the Israeli raid on Wafa office.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday vowed to build more settlement units in the occupied West Bank.
“As long as I am the Prime minister of Israel, not a single Jew will be uprooted from his home,” Netanyahu said in a statement following the opening of a new road near the city of Ramallah.
“Not only will Jews not be uprooted in Judea and Samaria, but more homes will be built,” he added, using the Jewish term for the occupied West Bank. Roughly 650,000 Israelis currently live on more than 100 Jewish-only settlements built throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem since Israel occupied the territories in 1967.
