KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 1: Malaysia said an emergency meeting of Muslim countries this week will call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East and discuss a formal United Nations peacekeeping force for Lebanon.

Malaysia is currently the chairman of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and will host nearly 20 of the group’s member nations in the country’s administrative capital of Putrajaya on Thursday.

“We want a UN peacekeeping force,” Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar was quoted as saying by the state Bernama news agency.

“We will also urge that such a force include the participation of Islamic nations.”

The gathering was originally intended as a meeting of the OIC’s executive committee, but had changed to include a number of member countries concerned over the violence in the Middle East, officials said.

A statement from Malaysia’s foreign ministry on Tuesday said the meeting would discuss the crisis and work out the action to be taken by OIC states.

The meeting is also expected to call on the UN and the international community to demand an unconditional ceasefire, the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force which must include OIC members, and properly coordinated humanitarian assistance, it said.

The ministry said countries attending the meeting were Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Syria, Turkey, the UAE and Yemen.— AFP