Islamic nations hold emergency meet over Israel-Gaza situation

The 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation opened an emergency meeting Sunday over the heavy fighting between Israel and the Gaza Strip’s militant Hamas rulers, the first major move among Mideast nations still grappling with how to address the conflict. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki of the Palestinian Authority, which administers autonomous enclaves in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, decried what he called Israel’s “cowardly attacks” at the start of the meeting. “The region’s only democracy,” tweeted the Emirati writer and political analyst Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi in writing about Israel’s strike on a Gaza building that housed the offices of The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. “If there are half-hearted statements within our own family, how could we criticize others who take our words seriously?” "Neither control nor responsibility" Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, said most Gulf Arab leaders fear Hamas’ rocket fire as “cynical, dangerous, unnecessarily provocative and endangering Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza alike.” That takes the pressure off those Gulf leaders to respond, unlike in other confrontations involving the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site in Jerusalem, or when Israeli settlers force Arab families out of their homes, he said. “There won’t be much sympathy for what is widely viewed in the Gulf as Israel’s heavy-handed and disproportionate retaliation,” Ibish wrote, “but it will be much easier for Gulf leaders and many citizens to regard the exchange as a tragic conflagration at the expense of ordinary people brought about by two leaderships over which they have neither control nor responsibility.” ALSO READ: Netanyahu says Israeli offensive in Gaza to continue as long as necessary