Tunisian president remarks on storm Daniel

The president of Tunisia criticised European Union monitors who were hoping to speak to the families of Tunisian prisoners.

Kais Saied also blasted the naming choice of the Mediterranean storm that hit neighbouring Libya last week, in scathing remarks in Tunis on Tuesday.

"Anyone who comes from abroad to monitor us is unwelcome and will not enter our land," Tunisian President Kais Saied in a video released by the Tunisian presidency.

Saied was also critical of the choice of name picked for the Mediterranean storm that caused deadly flooding across eastern Libya earlier this month.

The name, Daniel, was one that should have been questioned, Saied said and added: "He's a Hebrew prophet."

"The Zionist movement has infiltrated and the intellect and thinking have mostly been hit. We have become in a state of cognitive coma," he said.

"From Abraham to Daniel, it is very clear," he said, referring to the Abraham Accords that Israel eventually concluded with four Arab nations to normalise ties.

"I have no place for the term 'normalisation,' that they talk about, since normalisation is a major betrayal of the Palestinian people's rights to Palestine, to all of Palestine," the Tunisian president said.

Israel had reached diplomatic accords with four Arab countries under the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020 and is now hoping to establish official ties with Saudi Arabia.

The Palestinians view the pacts as a stab in the back from their fellow Arabs and a betrayal of their cause for a Palestinian state.

Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war.

The Palestinians want all three territories for their future state. Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and cultural heartland of the Jewish people.

There have been no serious or substantive peace negotiations in over a decade, and Israel is currently led by the most nationalist and religious government in its history, making any move toward Palestinian statehood almost unimaginable.