The OIC member states should issue a business contract regulation that ensures that vendors are "clean" from occupation businesses, and the products being offered are not from illegal Israeli settlements, Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq Law in the Service of Man, an independent human rights organization in Palestine, stated here on Monday.
"Indonesia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries should issue domestic laws on this issue. Every country must cooperate with the International Criminal Court to impose a firm sanction," he noted.
Since the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel in 1967, the Israeli Zionist regime has tightened its grip on Jerusalem and carried out ethnic cleansing to evict Palestinians by force, he pointed out.
Illegal eviction, destruction of homes, and expansion of occupation in Jerusalem is daily realities faced by Palestinians under the illegal occupation of Israel.
A total of 120,000 Palestinians had lost their permission to return to the West Bank from 1967 to 1989. Thousands of people in Jerusalem also lost their residency cards.
The Israeli economy even enjoyed US$6 billion a year from the occupied territories, Jabarin noted while speaking at an international conference on Jerusalem themed "Addressing the present and shaping the future of Jerusalem," which was also known as Al-Quds Al-Sharif.
The two-day conference hosted by the Indonesian Government on December 14-15 is being jointly held by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the OIC.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest mosque in Islam after Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and Nabawi Mosque in Madina, Saudi Arabia.
It is also the second mosque to ever be built on earth and the first qibla (the direction Muslims face while praying).(*)
Editor: Heru Purwanto
Copyright © ANTARA 2015
