CAIRO, Oct 2 (AFP) - The Arab League will hold an emergency session here on Sunday to discuss the violence in the Gaza Strip that has seen more than 50 Palestinians killed this week in a major Israeli incursion, the Palestinian representative said.
Mohammed Sobeih said the permanent delegates to the league would meet at the request of the Palestinians to "discuss the savage and continuing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in all cities, villages and refugee camps, notably in the Gaza Strip.
They will aim to "prepare an urgent Arab political and diplomatic action plan at the international level aimed at stopping the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, and to work toward the dispatch of international protection and peacekeeping forces to the occupied Palestinian territories."
Sobeih went on to denounce the fact that "the world's great powers are sending troops to other regions like the (Democratic Republic of) Congo and (western Sudan's) Darfur while keeping quiet about war crimes and genocide carried out daily by Israel against the Palestinian people."
The League's secretary general, Amr Mussa, repeated his condemnation of the Israeli incursion, saying the "complete silence of the quartet on Israeli crimes is a great shortcoming in its attitude to the Middle East peace process."
The quartet -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- jointly drafted the Middle East peace roadmap, a near moribund plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since Israel launched its operation Tuesday night aimed at preventing rockets from being fired at Israel from the northern Gaza Strip, 53 Palestinians have been killed. Five Israelis have also lost their lives, including two soldiers, and two children killed by one of the rockets.
Meanwhile, the League announced that it is to send a delegation to Algeria on Friday to prepare the next Arab League summit, due in March 2005, at which a new League charter is to be adopted.