(AFP) – Jan 2, 2009

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraqi preachers speaking at Friday prayers slammed Israel's deadly air strikes on the Gaza Strip and urged international leaders to try to make the Jewish state call a halt to the blitz.

"We ask the international community to use all means to put pressure on the Zionist regime to stop the savage attacks," Iraq's supreme Shiite religious authority Ali Husseini al-Sistani told worshippers.

"We ask the humanitarian organisations to support Gazans by providing them with the needed aid," Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai said during prayers in the holy city of Karbala, as both Shiite and Sunni clerics denounced the raids.

Israel's onslaught, which has killed at least 422 Palestinians in seven days of relentless bombing, was branded "shameless aggression" by Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand anti-US Shiite cleric and head of the powerful Sadr movement.

"All the international and humanitarian organisations have to make a united stand to put an end to this shameless Zionist terrorist aggression," Sadr said in a statement read to Friday prayer worshippers in Sadr city in western Baghdad.

He also asked Iraqis to come forward with medical and food donations.

After the prayer meeting, worshippers burned the Israeli flag and chanted: "No, No, to Israel," and "No No, to America."

"Gaza is now witnessing genocide and a real Holocaust," Friday prayer leader Sheikh Mohammed al-Jaburi told his congregation in the Sunni-dominated northern city of Mosul.

The Iraqi government on Saturday condemned the Israeli air raids, saying they left behind "many victims -- innocent people and children."

The government earlier this week pledged to send a planeload of food and medicine to the Gaza Strip.

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