CAIRO, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Arab League (AL) announced Sunday that it has formed a ministerial delegation tasked with responding to the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
The delegation will respond on the diplomatic and media levels to "the dangerous U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel," AL spokesman Mhamoud Afifi said in a statement.
The delegation includes the foreign ministers of Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as AL Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
Afifi said the delegation was formed in light of the contacts made by Jordan in recent days, in its capacity as the chair of the Arab summit and the Arab Peace Initiative Committee.
He added that the delegation will hold its first meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman early next week.
Defying strong opposition and warnings from the Palestinians and Muslim countries, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Dec. 6 to recognize the disputed holy city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and ordered to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The move has sparked widespread condemnation and protests from Muslim countries across the world, especially the Palestinians and Arab states in the Middle East. The Palestinians insist that East Jerusalem should be the capital of their future independent state.
Israel took over East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and declared the whole city as its eternal capital in 1980, a move never recognized by the international community which holds that the status of Jerusalem should be resolved in the Israeli-Palestinian final-status talks.
