Palestinians protest in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp during US President Joe Biden's visit to Jerusalem. (Courtesy of Muntasser Abdallah/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT – Nationalist and Islamic Palestinian factions in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon demonstrated on Friday against US President Joe Biden's visit in the Middle East and his visit to Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories on Friday, fearing that it would accelerate normalization with Israel, L’Orient Today’s correspondent in South Lebanon reported.
According to our correspondent, dozens of protesters gathered in the camp, waving Palestinian flags and chanting slogans against the visit: "No to normalization" with Israel, "Normalization is betrayal," "We will face the consequences of Biden's visit,” were signs that could be read in the protest.
Present at the scene, the representative of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine Ain al-Hilweh, Fouad Osman, expressed the "refusal by the Palestinian people of President Biden's visit to Palestine, which involves policies infringing national rights." He also said he was opposed to "normalization with Israel which will enshrine predominance and subordination with a view to building a new Middle East.”
For his part, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Saida, Abu Ali Hamdan maintained that "the formation of an Arab-Zionist front targeting the resistance forces will fail.”
Palestinians protest in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp during US President Joe Biden's visit to Jerusalem. (Courtesy of Muntasser Abdallah/L'Orient Today)
For his part, Ammar Hourani, head of Islamic Jihad in Saida, estimated that the American president "is trying to form a new diabolical alliance which brings together the axis of capitulation and normalization, as well as the Zionist enemy and Saudi Arabia.”
Finally, Ayman Chanaa, one of the leaders of the Islamist movement Hamas in Lebanon, also considered Biden's visit to the Middle East as an aim to "accelerate normalization with Israel ... and to save this tottering entity (Israel) from the repeated blows of the resistance.” Chanaa added that"Biden came to implant prostheses into this angry fake entity in an attempt to prolong its existence, but all these attempts and all alliances will fail."
According to AFP, President Biden acknowledged on Friday that there "must be a political horizon for the Palestinian people," despite the fact, he said, that the conditions were not right at this stage to relaunch the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Reporting for this article was contributed by correspondent Muntasser Abdallah.