BEIRUT: Thousands rallied across the Arab and Muslim world on Wednesday to protest the deaths of hundreds of people in a strike on a Gaza hospital that they blame on Israel, despite its denials.
Condemnation was widespread across the region and angry crowds gathered after calls from Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement and Palestinian factions for mass mobilisation.
“Death to America, death to Israel,” hundreds of Hezbollah supporters chanted at a rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
“The Israelis will try to target more hospitals, rescue workers, civil defence volunteers and Gaza’s residents without flinching, in order to push Gaza’s people out,” senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine told the demonstrators.
Protesters took to the streets of the West Bank city of Ramallah and Nablus, shouting “Free, free Palestine”.
Israel and Palestinian have traded blame for the hospital strike late Tuesday, with the Israeli army saying later it had “evidence” that were responsible.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which both established ties with Israel in the Abraham Accords of 2020, criticised Israel for being behind the strike, as it hits back at Hamas over a deadly attack on October 7.
“The United Arab Emirates strongly condemns the Israeli attack... resulting in the death and injury of hundreds of people,” the UAE’s official WAM news agency said early on Wednesday.
Bahrain’s foreign ministry “expressed the Kingdom of Bahrain’s condemnation and strong denunciation of the Israeli bombing”, the Bahrain News Agency said.
Saudi Arabia, which has halted talks on potential ties with Israel since violence flared, called the blast a “heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces”.
Qatar, one of Hamas’s main backers, slammed the “brutal massacre”.
Morocco, another country that recognised Israel in 2020, also blamed it for the strike, as did Egypt, which became the first Arab country to normalise relations with Israel in 1979.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi condemned in the strongest terms “the Israeli bombing” of the Ahli Arab hospital, which led to “the deaths of hundreds of innocent victims” among the Palestinian citizens in Gaza. He called the “deliberate bombing” a “clear violation of international law”.
Algeria condemned the strike as a “barbaric act” carried out by “occupation forces” while in Tunisia, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the French embassy, condemning Western support for Israel.
Some waved Palestinian flags while others demanded the ambassador be expelled, accusing France of being among the Western “allies of the Zionists”, AFP journalists reported. Libya’s Tripoli-based internationally recognised government called the hospital strike a “despicable crime” as several hundred people protested in Tripoli and other Libyan cities.
Hamas official Osama Hamdan also called for region-wide protests on Friday and Saturday, demanding the “expulsion of the ambassadors of the Zionist entity in all Arab and Islamic capitals”.