Hamas leader calls for follow-up meeting of Arab-Muslim countries to ‘break siege on Gaza’

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh calls for a new meeting of Arab and Muslim countries following a summit earlier this month in Riyadh.

According to a Hamas statement, Haniyeh has made several phone calls with regional and international leaders following the evacuation of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, where Israel claims that a Hamas command center was located and has provided evidence that military equipment was stored there.

During his round of calls, Haniyeh “stressed the need to hold an urgent meeting of the follow-up committee endorsed by the Arab and Islamic Summit to implement its decisions to stop the ongoing aggression and break the siege on the Gaza Strip.”

The summit held in the Saudi capital on November 11 saw the participation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a wider association of 57 mostly Muslim-majority states to which the Arab League countries belong.

The final declaration of the summit demanded that the United Nations Security Council adopt “a decisive and binding resolution” to halt Israel’s “aggression,” and rejected Israeli claims that it is acting in self-defense, but stopped short of adopting punitive economic and political steps against Jerusalem.