At the end of the 37th African Union (AU) summit, which took place the weekend of Feb. 17–18 in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), the organization’s member states pledged their “unbreakable, permanent and total commitment to the Palestinian people in their legitimate struggle against the […] occupation and for the restoration of their inalienable rights,” including the right to self-determination, the return of refugees and the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem [al-Quds] as its capital.

Another declaration highlights the need to put an end to the […] occupation, which undermines the foundations of the international legal order. The African countries renewed their call for an end to […] aggression against Gaza and expressed their deep dismay at the humanitarian and health catastrophe in that territory. Up to now, the genocidal war waged in Gaza by Tel Aviv has already claimed more than 100,000 victims, including all dead, wounded and missing.

In the same vein, the AU summit called for removing Cuba from the list of countries allegedly sponsoring terrorism, a list drawn up unilaterally by the U.S. The pan-African organization condemned, for the fifteenth consecutive year, the illegal economic, commercial and financial blockade perpetrated by Washington against Havana, now for more than six decades.

The African countries reaffirmed their support for the resolution that the United Nations General Assembly passes every year regarding removing the blockade of Cuba and deplored the measures implemented by the U.S. at the end of 2017, which reinforced this unilateral measure and extended its extraterritorial character.