NABLUS, West Bank, 27 May 2003 — Around 5,000 Palestinian students demonstrated in the West Bank town of Nablus yesterday, vowing to keep Jews out of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which is the third holiest site in Islam, an AFP correspondent at the scene said. At the demonstration, which was organized at Nablus’ Al-Najar University by the Hamas resistance movement, students warned the Israeli government not to allow Jews to enter the mosque compound.

The rally comes 10 days after an Israeli minister promised Jews would soon be allowed to pray at Jerusalem’s mosque compound even without the agreement of its Muslim guardians. “We are ready to prevent the Jews from entering Al-Aqsa. We are all ready to be martyrs in order to defend it,” the students shouted.

At the demonstration, they blew up a four-meter long wooden replica of a bus, and a model of a Land Rover. Speaking to the crowds, Ahmed Haj Ali, one of the local political leaders of Hamas, slammed the Mideast road map for peace which was grudgingly approved by Israel on Sunday. “The road map is a trick. The only map that will lead us to victory is jihad,” he said, using the Arabic term for holy war.

Meanwhile, Arab League head Amr Moussa said yesterday that by embracing the road map to Middle East peace, Israel was committing itself to stop building settlements and withdraw from occupied Arab land. Moussa told Reuters in an interview Heraklion, Greece, that the onus was now on Israel to carry out those steps outlined in the plan, or risk derailing a peace process endorsed by its ally the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

“The Israelis expressed interest in changing the road map, it was not approved. Once they accepted the road map, they accepted it in its contours and its details, regardless of their reservations. The reservations are their business,” he said. “In implementation we’ll see the litmus test: whether there will be true implementation or just a public relations gimmick. I prefer to see the positive side. They agreed to the road map, Palestinian state, withdrawal, stopping settlements.”

The Israeli Cabinet on Sunday approved the US-backed road map in a breakthrough that formally committed the Jewish state for the first time to the establishment of a Palestinian state. But the decision was accompanied by reaffirmation of Israeli reservations about the plan, which the United States has said would be addressed as it was being implemented, and rejection of any right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in what became Israel in 1948.

Speaking on the sideline of a meeting of the European Union and its Mediterranean neighbors, Moussa said he was confident that Washington would match its pressure on Palestinians to rein in militants by leaning on Israel on those issues.

“There has to be, otherwise it would be of no meaning to publish a road map and make all those diplomatic efforts without the necessary diplomatic pressure on both sides to move ahead and advance,” he said.

Iran yesterday blasted the road map as an unworkable “new hardship” for Arabs and Palestinians, state radio reported. “The road map is a new hardship for Arab countries and Palestinians, and, considering the Zionist regime’s policies, the execution of this plan is not possible,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi said.

A hard-line Iranian paper also labeled the plan a “road map to nowhere”, and called on Palestinians to reject the internationally-sponsored peace plan and continue armed resistance.

Kayhan newspaper said the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s acceptance of the plan was a “tactical move” to buy time for a state it said was “an illegal entity that ought not to exist on the map of the Middle East”.

“The road map has nothing to offer and leads nowhere. All it seeks is to legitimize the occupation of Palestine by the Zionist migrants from Europe,” the paper said.