(JTA) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the only path for the Palestinians is resistance, not peace talks.
Ahmadinejad made the comment in his Sept. 3 speech for Al Quds day, the last Friday in Ramadan, which the late Ayatollah Khomeini set up in the 1980s as an anti-Israel rallying day. The Iranian leader also said that Israel was too "weak" to strike Iran.
Speculation has increased in recent weeks that Israel will strike Iran within a year to keep it from achieving a nuclear weapons capability.
A range of Iranian officials said that renewed Palestinian-Israeli peace talks launched this week in Washington would come to naught.
Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, accused the Egyptian and Jordanian leaders of "betraying" their people by attending and sanctioning the talks. In retaliation, Egypt withdrew an invitation to Mottaki to attend a meeting of members of the nonaligned movement next week.
Iranian media predicted millions of Iranians would rally on Al-Quds day, named for the Arabic term for Jerusalem.
"Today millions of people will shout out their will for liberation of the holy Quds from the devil’s claw of Zionists," the Associated Press quoted the Fars news agency as saying.
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