Abbas urges Muslims and Christians to visit Palestine

President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday urged Muslim and Christian Arabs to visit Palestine to show support for the Palestinian people. "We welcome any Arab Muslim and Christian visiting Jerusalem and Bethlehem," Abbas said in a meeting with Egyptian journalists and intellectuals at the end of his 3-day visit to Cairo. "Coming to this country does not mean normalization between the visitors' countries and Israel, but rather a visit to imprisoned people not to those who imprison them." Abbas criticized the Islamic world's indifference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and blamed some Islamic intellectuals for "issuing Fatwa suggesting that visiting al-Aqsa Mosque and offering support is prohibited according to the Islamic regulations. "Prophet Muhammad, though, mentioned al-Aqsa Mosque as one of the few mosques Muslims should set out to," the president said. Influential Muslim cleric Yousef al-Qaradawi recently said that visiting the mosque while it remains under Israeli occupation would be a breach of religious regulations. Al-Qaradawi visited the Hamas-run Gaza Strip earlier in May, a step that was strongly denounced by Palestinian Authority officials who said such visits had political implications and maintained disunity between the Palestinians. Abbas said that Arab and Islamic countries and organizations had pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to support Jerusalem during conferences and summits, but that only a small portion of the pledged money was sent. During the Arab League summit in Libya the conveners agreed to allocate $500 million to Jerusalem, but in reality only $37 million was delivered, Abbas said. At another Arab League summit in Doha, Arab countries agreed to allocate $1 billion to Jerusalem, but that was "just a number," the president said.