Morocco says ready to deliberate petition to halt normalisation with Israel

The Moroccan government said, Wednesday, that it is ready to deliberate a petition calling for halting normalisation with Israel, Anadolu Agency reports.

The government “is ready to deliberate the petition”, government spokesman, Mustafa Baytas, said following a cabinet meeting.

Human rights activists announced plans to submit a petition demanding the government halt normalising relations with Israel.

A petition is one of the means for Moroccans to urge the government to adopt public policies or cancel agreements. A government committee looks into any submitted petition to either accept or reject it, according to Moroccan law.

Any petition must be signed by 5,000 people to be considered by the committee.

“Petitions are organised by the 2011 Constitution, which grants citizens this opportunity to express their opinions about development issues or to request the enactment of legislation and laws,” Baytas said.

Morocco was the fourth Arab country to agree to normalise ties with Israel in 2020 after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

Israel has pounded the Palestinian enclave since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group, Hamas, on 7 October, killing at least 23,357 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 59,410 others, according to local health authorities. Around 1,200 Israelis believed to have been killed in the Hamas offensive.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

About 85 per cent of Gazans have been displaced, while all of them are food insecure, according to the UN. Hundreds of thousands of people are living without shelter and less than half of aid trucks are entering the Territory before the start of the conflict.

READ: Thousands march in Morocco in rejection of normalisation with Israel