Hamas, committee: Morocco should think twice before receiving ill-famed Peres

Hamas on Sunday branded an upcoming visit by former Israeli president Shimon Peres to Morocco an attempt to polish Israel’s reputation and open the doors for normalization with such a “colonizing entity”.

Peres is expected to pay a visit to Morocco to attend the Clinton Global Initiative’s First Middle East and Africa Conference set to kick off on May 5 in the central Moroccan city of Marrakesh.

Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement posted on his Facebook page Peres’s visit to Morocco would only make Israel look better in front of the rest of the world and open the door for “perilous” normalization with the self-proclaimed Jewish state.

Barhoum expressed hopes that the King and government of Morocco will reconsider Peres’s projected visit to their country.

Earlier, on Saturday, the Moroccan Committee to Support the Nation’s Causes denounced Peres’s upcoming stopover in Morocco.

“Palestine is everybody’s cause. It is the central cause of the Nation. Its liberation depends on our emancipation from the tyranny contaminating our Arab homelands,” member of the committee’s executive bureau, Abdul Hafidh Sukrat, said in a speech delivered in a cultural ceremony staged at the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences of Ben M’sik.

Peres popped in Morocco on three previous occasions, in 1986, 1993, and 1996, raising questions as to where does the Kingdom precisely stand vis-à-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.