According to Lebanon’s Al Hadath TV, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh on Monday proposed, nay, demanded a maritime humanitarian corridor between the Gaza Strip and Cyprus.
“We demand that a humanitarian corridor to Gaza be opened as an alternative to the Rafah crossing,” Al Hadath TV quoted the PM as saying. “We proposed opening a maritime humanitarian corridor between Cyprus and the Gaza Strip.”
The distance between Gaza City and the southernmost port city in Cyprus, Limassol, is about 380 kilometers (236 miles).
On Sunday, PM Shtayyeh called on the international community to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip. “The international community must stop dealing with Palestine with double standards,” he said. “We are under a colonial military occupation with a hideous apartheid regime, and everything Israel does in the Palestinian territories is a violation of international humanitarian law.”
The idea of shipping thousands of Arabs from Gaza to anywhere else in the world has been suggested by many on the right in Israel, but no one to date has come up with Cyprus as a safe haven, even if temporarily.
Jewish Holocaust survivors who were barred by the British government from entering Palestine were housed in internment camps in Cyprus. There were 12 camps, which operated from August 1946 to January 1949, and held 53,510 Jews altogether.
Northern Cyprus, officially known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, is a de facto state that was established after a Turkish invasion in 1974. The new arrangement partitioned the island between its Turkish and Greek inhabitants. Only Turkey officially recognizes Northern Cyprus, and due to Northern Cyprus’s isolation and heavy reliance on Turkish support, Turkey has a high level of influence over the country’s politics, making it, in effect, a Turkish puppet state.
Ninety-nine percent of Turkish Cypriots are Sunni Muslims, but Northern Cyprus is a secular state, where alcohol is freely available and most Turkish Cypriot women do not cover their heads. Most Turkish Cypriot males are circumcised.
