Palestine envoy to UK expresses gratitude to Hamza, Wesley

The Palestinian envoy in the UK has expressed gratitude to Leicester City’s Bangladesh-origin footballer Hamza Choudhury and his teammate Wesley Fofana for showing support for Palestine winning the FA Cup final on Saturday.

In a letter posted on twitter, Ambassador Husam Zomlot said the carrying his country’s flag “on the stage of one of football’s august cup competitions is a show of support that is reverberating all over Palestine.”

Also read- Bangladeshi-origin footballer Hamza shows solidarity with Palestine after winning FA Cup

Hamza and Wesley held each end of the flag while they made their lap of honour in front of fans at the Wembley.

Hamza then draped the flag across his shoulders as he went up to collect his winner's medal before lifting the trophy for the first time in the club's history.

“For a people beleaguered, occupied and under intense bombardment for daring to stand up for their rights, your gesture could not be more timely and appreciated,” the Palestinian envoy said in his letter.

Letter to Hamza Choudhury and Wesley Fofana, Leicester Football Club, who used the occasion of the FA cup triumph to show solidarity with the Palestinian people 🇵🇸🙏🏽✌🏽✊@Wesley_Fofanaa@HamzaChoudhury1@LCFC
#SavePalestine #Jerusalem #GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/1gSm7tJnH8

— Husam Zomlot (@hzomlot) May 15, 2021

Congratulating the players and their club for the victory, Ambassador Zomlot said he hope that they will one day come to play in Jerusalem.

At least 153 people, including 42 children, have been killed in Gaza since Monday while Israel has reported 10 deaths, including two children, Reuters reported.

On Sunday, Israel bombed the home of Hamas's chief in Gaza and the Islamist group fired rocket barrages at Tel Aviv as hostilities stretched into a seventh day with no sign of abating.

Both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the enclave, insisted they would continue their cross-border fire after Israel destroyed a 12-storey building in Gaza City that housed the US Associated Press and Qatar-based Al Jazeera media operations.

The Israel military said the al-Jala building was a legitimate military target, containing Hamas military offices, and that it had given advance warnings to civilians to get out of the building.

In what Hamas called a reprisal for Israel's destruction of the al-Jala building, Hamas fired 120 rockets overnight, the Israeli military said, with many intercepted and around a dozen falling short and landing in Gaza.

Israelis dashed for bomb shelters as sirens warning of incoming rocket fire blared in Tel Aviv and the southern city of Beersheba. Around 10 people were injured while running for shelters, medics said.

Hamas began its rocket assault on Monday after weeks of tensions over a court case to evict several Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, and in retaliation for Israeli police clashes with Palestinians near the city's Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.