GAZA, Nov 14: Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets on Wednesday to renew calls for an independent state 13 years after their leader, Yasser Arafat, made a symbolic declaration of statehood in Algiers.

“The state is coming, the state is coming,” chanted a crowd of 3,000 at a Gaza Strip rally on the eve of the November 15 anniversary of the Algiers declaration, a national holiday for Palestinians.

The 11 factions that make up the Palestine Liberation Organization, including Arafat’s Fatah, issued a statement calling on the international community to make good on its verbal support of a Palestinian state.

“The general talk about the Palestinian state remains insufficient and incomplete unless it is accompanied by deeds, especially from the American administration, which has been showing a flagrant bias (in favour of) Israel’s occupation and aggression,” the PLO statement read.

Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, said on Wednesday a Palestinian state was “today almost an accepted solution by all parties”.

“There are differences about the size, the connection, the security. But the idea that two peoples, the Israelis and the Palestinians, must have two separate states that will co-exist in a fair manner is accepted by everybody,” Peres told CNN.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a right-winger, also supports a state, though his vision falls short of Palestinian aspirations for an entity on all of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Diab al-Louh, a Fatah leader, said the Palestinian revolt, that erupted in September 2000 after peace talks deadlocked, would only end with the advent of Palestinian statehood.

“The Palestinian state should come as a top priority for the world’s agenda,” he said. —Reuters