ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan said Pakistan would never recognize Israel until Palestinian rights were guaranteed, in a wide-ranging interview to a local news channel on Friday evening.
The Israel Hayom and other Israeli media outlets reported this week in a veiled reference to Pakistan that a senior adviser to the leader of a large Muslim majority country in Asia that had no diplomatic ties with Israel had visited the Jewish state two weeks ago with a delegation of senior officials to discuss the potential normalization of relations
“We will never recognize Israel until the Palestinians get their rights,” Khan said while speaking to Samaa television.
“Secondly, Pakistan is a democratic society...[and] our entire nation stands with the Palestinians,” he said.
“Why would anyone go from Pakistan... when it’s our policy that we don’t recognize Israel?” he continued.
“What’s a minister going to do there? This is absolutely fake news.”
Khan’s comments were broadcast hours after Pakistan’s foreign minister rubbished reports the same day that Pakistan and Israeli officials had been in talks in Tel Aviv while speaking to press during a state visit to Abu Dhabi.
On Wednesday, Zulfi Bukhari, Special Assistant to PM Khan for Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development, dismissed rumours that he had visited Israel, after reports of an alleged meeting took Pakistani Twitter by storm.
But Khan hinted on Friday that Pakistan was not ‘free’ to make its own foreign policy decisions. Khan also said India was behind the disinformation 'campaign' against his government.
Pakistan currently does not recognize the state of Israel over its thwarting of Palestinians’ aspirations for a state of their own. Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future free state, a demand Pakistan has supported for decades.
Earlier this week, the head of the Pakistan Ulema Council, Tahir Ashrafi, told Arab News the reports were an attempt to malign Pakistan in the Muslim world, and that Islamabad would not recognize Israel until a just solution to the Palestine conflict was found.
“It is the clear stance of Prime Minister Imran Khan and his cabinet,” Ashrafi said.
“The state of Pakistan including our people, armed forces, institutions and government, are on the same page regarding this issue.”
In the same interview, Khan said Pakistan was putting as much pressure as possible on the Taliban to reach a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan.
“After Afghanistan, we [Pakistan] are the beneficiaries of peace in that country,” he said.
A delegation of the Taliban Political Commission headed by the Afghan Taliban’s top political leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, called on Khan on Friday to discuss progress on peace talks between the insurgent group and the Kabul government.
The interview included hard hitting questions about the Prime Minister’s working relationship with Pakistan’s powerful military, which has been the primary target of a large-scale opposition alliance campaign to oust the current government on allegations of army-backed rigging in the 2018 elections.
The army and government deny this.
“There is a lot of anger in the army, but General Bajwa is a sensible man,” Khan said, and added that the army chief believed in democracy.