At joint Hamas-Fatah rally in West Bank, 2,000 protest Israel-UAE deal

Several thousand Palestinians on Wednesday held a protest in the West Bank against last week’s announcement that Israel was normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates.

Members of terror group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the Fatah faction of president Mahmoud Abbas’s West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, took part in the rally in a rare joint initiative.

“Today we tell the world that we are united against ‘the deal of the century,’ annexation and normalization,” Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh told the rally in the village of Turmusaya.

The bombshell announcement last week that Israel and the energy-rich UAE would normalize ties sparked fury among Palestinians, with both Hamas and the PA leadership denouncing the US-brokered agreement.

Under the deal Israel said it would suspend its plans to unilaterally annex settlements and other territory in the West Bank.

The allocation of some 30 percent of West Bank territory to Israel, with the Palestinians allocated the rest and additional land from within Israel for a conditional Palestinian state, was outlined in the Middle East peace proposal unveiled in January by US President Donald Trump.

“Any normalization legitimizes the occupation of Palestinian territories,” Shtayyeh said of the UAE deal. “It’s a stab in the back.”

Around 2,000 Palestinians took part in the rally at Turmusaya, a village in the north of the West Bank nestled between the cities of Ramallah and Nablus.

They traveled there by bus from other areas of the West Bank and clashes took place between protesters and Israeli forces on the outskirts of the village.

The protesters threw stones at Israeli forces who responded with tear gas.

Earlier on Wednesday, hundreds of Palestinians held a protest in the Gaza Strip to denounce the UAE-Israel deal.