Pakistan, along with 13 other nations, has condemned the remarks made by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, where he suggested that he would not be opposed to Tel Aviv taking over large swathes of the Middle East, the Foreign Office said on Sunday.
Huckabee made the remarks in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Friday, where the envoy asserted that Israel’s borders are based on the Bible when questioned about the country’s current boundaries.
In response, Carlson noted that the biblical verse included the region between the Euphrates River in Iraq and the Nile in Egypt. To this, Huckabee, who is a staunch pro-Israel conservative, said, “It would be fine if they (Israel) took it all”.
In a joint-statement, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Indonesia, Kuwait, Oman, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, along with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the League of Arab States (LAS), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), expressed “profound concern” regarding Huckabee’s statement.
“They affirm their countries’ categorical rejection of such dangerous and inflammatory remarks, which constitute a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and pose a grave threat to the security and stability of the region,” the statement said.
The joint statement stressed that Huckabee’s remarks were in contradiction of “the vision put forward by US President Donald Trump, as well as the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, which are based on containing escalation and creating a political horizon for a comprehensive settlement that ensures the Palestinian people have their own independent state”.
It stressed that Trump’s plan was “grounded in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence, and that remarks seeking to legitimise control over the lands of others undermine these objectives, fuel tensions, and constitute incitement rather than advancing peace”.
The countries maintained that Israel held “no sovereignty whatsoever over the Occupied Palestinian Territory or any other occupied Arab lands”.
“They reiterated their firm rejection of any attempts to annex the West Bank or separate it from the Gaza Strip, their strong opposition to the expansion of settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and their categorical rejection of any threat to the sovereignty of Arab states,” the statement read.
The ministers also warned against the “continuation of Israel’s expansionist policies,” stating that the “unlawful measures will only inflame violence and conflict in the region and undermine the prospects for peace”.
They called for “an end to these incendiary statements”. The statement further underscored the countries’ “steadfast commitment to the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of their independent state along the lines of June 4, 1967, and the end of the occupation of all Arab lands”.