Raisi made the remarks while addressing reporters in Tehran early Sunday upon his return from an extraordinary joint summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League in Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh.
The summit came as Israel continued its war of genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip despite growing calls to end the regime’s atrocities.
The regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after the territory’s resistance movements carried out the surprise Operation al-Aqsa Storm in response to Israel’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people.
Since then, over 11,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in Israel’s war of genocide in Gaza.
The Iranian president said during his address to the summit, he “introduced the United States as the main culprit in these crimes [that are being committed by Israel in Gaza].”
Raisi stressed that the United States “plays the most important role both in [helping] survival of the Zionist regime and in arming and supporting it in its massacre of Palestinian women and children”.
Noting that the Islamic Republic has solid views on the issue of Palestine, the Iranian president said, “During this trip, I tried to be the voice of the Iranian nation and those people who shout the right of Palestinians in streets.”
“Since the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Iran has had clear-cut views on the right of Palestinian people, while at the same time, considering the Zionist regime as a fake and usurping regime with no identity,” he continued.
He added that the Islamic Republic considers the liberation of the occupied city of al-Quds and restoration of the Palestinian nation’s rights as the top priority of the Muslim world and a criteria for evaluating true positions of countries on this issue.
Raisi noted that explaining Iran’s viewpoints on the issue of Palestine and expounding various aspects of “Zionists’ crimes against humanity as well as war crimes and genocide” in the besieged Gaza Strip were other important goals of his participation in the Riyadh summit.
He then touched on 10 proposals and solutions that Iran offered in the summit to show the way out of the current crisis in Gaza, stressing that supporting Palestinian resistance is the sole way that leads to the liberation of the Holy al-Quds.
“In this summit, in contrast to the two-state solution that some parties proposed on the future of Palestine, we offered a totally democratic solution based on having all Palestinians, including Muslims, Christians and Jews, vote [through a referendum] to determine their fate,” Iran’s president said.
He noted that passage of time, even if it is 75 years, does not “give a usurping and occupying regime legitimacy and the right of ownership” over Palestinian territories.
