Acting Pakistani Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar announced Thursday that New Year celebrations will be banned nationwide to “express solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”
“The whole Pakistani nation and the Muslim world are in a state of deep grief over the genocide of unarmed Palestinians, especially the massacre of children, in Gaza and the West Bank,” Kakar said.
“Since October 7, 2023, more than 21,000 innocent Palestinians have been martyred by the brutal Israeli forces, including a large number of innocent children — around 9,000,” he said, quoting unverified figures furnished by the Hamas terrorist organization.
“Given the extremely worrying situation in Palestine and to express solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, there will be a complete countrywide ban on organizing any kind of events in connection with the New Year celebration,” he decreed.
Kakar said the ban would be “strict,” but did not provide many details about enforcement or punishment. Instead, he talked about aid packages Pakistan has sent to Gaza and discussions his administration has held with Egypt and Jordan to evacuate wounded residents.
Kakar has frequently denounced Israel’s “brutal” and “deplorable” counter-terrorist opposition in Gaza. He was far less critical of the Hamas atrocities on October 7 that started the war, although he did profess himself to be “heartbroken” by the violence and urged “restraint and protection of civilians” by all parties.
However, a few days after the Hamas attack, Kakar said the “two-state solution” for the Palestinian problem “does not at all mean accepting Israel as a separate state,” so his vision for the future looks a lot more like a one-state solution.
Kakar was named caretaker prime minister in August after the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif dissolved to pave the way for elections. Before receiving the appointment, Kakar was a senator from Pakistan’s sparsely populated Balochistan province. His obscurity was one of the reasons he was chosen for the job. Another was that his nominally independent minor party is linked to the enormously powerful Pakistani military.
“We first agreed that whoever should be prime minister, he should be from a smaller province so smaller provinces’ grievances should be addressed,” opposition leader Raja Riaz Ahmad explained after meeting with Sharif and settling on Kakar as the interim prime minister.
The leading opposition candidate, former prime minister Imran Khan, was technically disqualified from the race when he was tossed in jail on several of the many corruption charges pending against him. Khan and his supporters annoyed the military by accusing its members of treason and damaging military assets during riots following one of Khan’s arrests.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) emirate of Sharjah also banned New Year celebrations on Thursday as a “sincere expression of solidarity and humanitarian cooperation with our siblings in the Gaza Strip.”
The Sharjah ban applied specifically to fireworks and threatened arrest and prosecution for violators.
