Former National Assembly speaker and senior Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) leader Asad Qaiser demanded that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif apologise to the nation “for hurting public sentiments on the issue of Palestine”.
Addressing the lower house on Friday, the PTI leader said “no decision would be acceptable until the will of the Palestinian people was made part of the process”.
Earlier today, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said that the 20-point Gaza peace plan released by US President Donald Trump was “not ours” but insisted that there was no room for politicking on the matter.
Eight Muslim and Arab countries — Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt — held a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly session, where the US president discussed his plan for ending the Israeli onslaught in Gaza.
On Sept 29, US President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met and, in a press conference after the meeting, announced the former’s 20-point plan for Gaza. However, despite Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s initial welcoming of the plan, Dar had later made it clear in so many words that the plan for Gaza would not be acceptable if the amendments — jointly proposed by eight Muslim countries — were not included.
Speaking on the floor today, Qaiser criticised the government for failing to take the parliament into confidence on key national decisions. Referring to the ‘peace plan’ presented by Trump, Qaiser claimed no Muslim leader had endorsed the agreement, yet Shehbaz “in a display of sycophancy” acknowledged an incomplete agreement through social media.
“If the deal was so good, why did the Palestinians reject it,“ asked the PTI leader and added that the premier had played with the “emotions of the Pakistani people”. He further stated that the people of Pakistan would never accept the recognition of Israel.
“Any peace accord is incomplete without the recognition of an independent Palestinian state, with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital,” he asserted. Qaiser also demanded immediate diplomatic efforts for the release of Pakistanis detained on the Flotilla.
Referring to the foreign minister’s clarification on the Shama Junejo controversy raised more questions and the responsibility lay with the premier as she was the “prime minister’s speech writer”.
Columnist and social media activist Junejo claimed earlier that Prime Minister Shehbaz had included her among the delegates as an adviser.
The controversy had surfaced when photos from Defence Minister Khawaja Asif’s address at a UN Security Council session on artificial intelligence (AI) spread like wildfire on social media platform X, with users pointing to Junejo sitting in the background. Several of them also shared screenshots from her Twitter (now X) timeline from several years ago, expressing support for Israel — a position sharply at odds with Pakistan’s longstanding pro-Palestinian stance.
After social media furore, Asif said on X that only the Foreign Office could explain Junejo’s presence at the session. Later, the FO clarified that she had not been part of Pakistan’s accredited delegation.
