Tens of thousands of citizens demonstrated yesterday Sunday in Casablanca, Morocco’s financial capital, in solidarity with the Palestinian people, calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and for the kingdom’s diplomatic relations with Israel, which were restored in 2020, to be severed.

A four-day truce has been in effect in the Palestinian enclave since Friday, seven weeks after war broke out between Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army, triggered by a bloody raid by militants of the Palestinian Islamist movement into Israel on October 7. .

“We don’t need a truce, but a definitive ceasefire,” to give “peace” a chance, “to establish a sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem,” Socialist lawmaker Nabila Munib told AFP, adding that she wants to see also “the return of all those exiled to the Palestinian diaspora” and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Waving Palestinian flags and wearing Palestinian headscarves, protesters demanded the severance of relations between Morocco and Israel, three years after they were normalized under a Washington-backed rapprochement process between the Jewish state and Arab countries, an AFP correspondent found.

“We condemn the silence of the reckless Arab regimes that have allied themselves with the Zionist entity (ie Israel),” said Hassan Bahadou, a member of the Moroccan Front in Support of Palestine and Against Normalization, which called the rally. It is a loose alliance of leftist and Islamist factions.

Mass mobilizations in solidarity with the Palestinian people had waned in recent years in Morocco, but the war in the Gaza Strip has given them new impetus.

Moroccan cardiologist Safae Abdelrazak stated that “we are here, the ‘doctors for Palestine’, to condemn the Israeli attack on our Palestinian brothers and our fellow doctors, who are being tortured and witnessed in Gaza.”