Qatar, Saudi, Egypt join call for Hamas to disarm, give up Gaza rule
Seventeen countries plus the European Union and Arab League threw their weight behind a seven-page text agreed at a United Nations conference on reviving the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
"In the context of ending the war in Gaza, Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State," said the declaration.
It followed a call Monday by the Palestinian delegation at the United Nations for both Israel and Hamas to leave Gaza, allowing the Palestinian Authority to administer the coastal territory.
The text also condemned the deadly Hamas attacks against Israel of October 7, 2023, which launched the war.
France, which co-chaired the conference with Saudi Arabia, called the declaration "both historic and unprecedented."
"For the first time, Arab countries and those in the Middle East condemn Hamas, condemn October 7, call for the disarmament of Hamas, call for its exclusion from Palestinian governance, and clearly express their intention to normalize relations with Israel in the future," said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot.
The text, co-signed by France, Britain and Canada among other western nations, also called for the possible deployment of foreign forces to stabilize Gaza after the end of hostilities.
Israel and its ally the United States did not take part in the meeting.
- 21 months of war -
"We supported the deployment of a temporary international stabilization mission upon invitation by the Palestinian Authority and under the aegis of the United Nations and in line with UN principles, building on existing UN capacities, to be mandated by the UN Security Council, with appropriate regional and international support," said the declaration.
The document was issued at the second day of the conference in New York at which Britain announced it may recognize a Palestinian state in September.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said London would proceed with recognition if Israel did not fulfil conditions including implementing a ceasefire in Gaza and allowing in sufficient aid.
For decades, most UN members have supported a two-state solution with Israel and a Palestinian state existing side-by-side.
But after more than 21 months of war in Gaza, the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and Israeli officials declaring designs to annex occupied territory, it is feared a Palestinian state could become geographically impossible.
The current war in Gaza started following the Hamas attacks on Israel, which responded with a large-scale military response that has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives and destroyed most infrastructure in the enclave.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the meeting Monday "the two-state solution is farther than ever before."
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
France and Saudis vow to keep up momentum for ‘two-state solution' to Israel-Palestinian conflict
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — After decades of inaction and frozen negotiations, the issue of an independent Palestinian state living in peace with Israel returned to the spotlight at a high-level U.N. conference — and France and Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded the effort, are determined to keep up the momentum. But hurdles for a two-state solution that would see Israel living side-by-side with an independent Palestine are very high. War in Gaza — a crucial part of a hoped-for Palestinian state — drags on with escalating violence in the West Bank, the other main component. And Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government vehemently oppose an independent Palestinian state, which the Israeli leader says would be a reward for terrorism after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against his country. Nonetheless, after eight decades of conflict between Israel and Palestinians, pressure is growing for a two-state solution, as last week's high-level U.N. conference co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia demonstrated — even if it was boycotted by Israel and its close ally, the United States. The conference illustrated that many believe a political solution is possible The French U.N. ambassador, Jerome Bonnafont, conceded in an Associated Press interview that without a Gaza ceasefire and massive humanitarian aid for over 2 million Palestinians sliding toward famine, 'it will be extremely difficult to move forward to define a new way of administering Gaza as part of Palestine' – and he said these are priority issues. But the conference demonstrated that a majority of the U.N.'s 193 member nations are 'convinced that there is a possibility of a political solution,' he said, and that is 'what its follow-up will continue to promote.' About 160 of the U.N.'s 193 member nations participated, 125 spoke in support of a two-state solution (forcing the meeting into an unexpected third day), and between 40 and 50 were represented by a government minister. An independent state of Palestine is recognized by over 145 countries, and the meeting sparked new pledges of recognition by three of the seven members of the powerful Group of Seven — France, United Kingdom and Canada — as well as Malta. A statement by seven others, including Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Portugal, expressed 'positive consideration' of following suit. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farham are determined not to let the spotlight fade. They are planning 'an event' during the annual gathering of world leaders at the General Assembly, which starts Sept. 23, when the new pledges are expected to be officially announced. The conference was notable for being co-chaired by an Arab and Western nation, and for setting up eight working groups with diverse chairs to make proposals on key issues for a two state solution — security for Israel and an independent Palestine, political reforms, legal problems, humanitarian assistance, economic development and Gaza reconstruction, to name some. The result was a seven-page 'New York Declaration.' The French and Saudi foreign ministers sent the declaration, with a lengthy annex of recommendations from the working groups, to all 193 U.N. members and asked them to endorse it by early September, before the world leaders' gathering. The declaration, which also was endorsed by the European Union and Arab League, urges Israel to commit to a Palestinian state, and urges further recognitions as 'an essential and indispensable component of the achievement of the two-state solution.' The declaration contains some stronger language For the first time, the Arab League's 22 member nations condemned 'the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians' in southern Israel on Oct. 7, and agree that 'Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority.' It sets out a plan to then move to an independent, demilitarized Palestine, including deployment of a U.N. Security Council-mandated 'temporary international stabilization mission' supported by the Palestinian Authority. It would protect civilians, help build support for a Palestinian state and its security forces, and provide 'security guarantees for Palestine and Israel.' Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group's U.N. director, gave French President Emmanuel Macron credit 'for raising the level of ambition for the conference,' and helping make it 'more symbolically significant than many diplomats expected.' The meeting gave weighty states including France, Britain and Canada the opportunity 'to signal their discontent with Israeli policy,' he said, and it gave Palestinians seeking a peaceful road to statehood 'some political ammunition.' Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who hosted a Hamas delegation in Istanbul last week to discuss Gaza's humanitarian crisis and stalled ceasefire talks, noted growing global support for the Palestinians and a Palestinian state — and Israel's increasing isolation. Bonnafont, the French ambassador, had messages for Israel's opponents and Israelis seeking more territory. 'We say to those who are hostile to Israel, the way to peace is certainly not to deny the right of existence to Israel. This is the way to perpetual war,' Bonnafont said. 'And the real way to defend the Palestinians is to give them a state, and the only way to give them a state is a two-state solution — and we have demonstrated concretely that this solution exists and is feasible.'
Politico
an hour ago
- Politico
The challenge in expanding aid to Gaza
'FAMINES HAVE MOMENTUM' — President Donald Trump signaled a subtle shift within the White House last week, publicly recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Trump acknowledged 'real starvation' in Gaza, while Vice President J.D. Vance urged Israel to increase humanitarian aid access. Other top U.S. officials visited Gaza to witness the humanitarian crisis for themselves before devising an aid plan for the area. The recalibration reflects mounting pressure from both Democrats and Trump allies to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza, as over 1000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to receive aid, and international watchdogs warn of a widespread famine. Globally, U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have announced that they will recognize a state of Palestine in September if a ceasefire agreement is not reached or if the Palestinian Authority commits to reforms and elections, respectively. But despite an increased willingness from Trump officials to confirm the existence of a humanitarian crisis, the administration has been light on actual details. Malnutrition remains a widespread problem, even as Israel has started daily pauses in military operations in parts of Gaza and Israel and the U.K. have airdropped aid. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — the two officials who visited Gaza 't o help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza' — have also yet to share specifics on what that plan could look like. The silence may in part be because increasing aid is a complicated task — especially in a conflict-ridden area like the Gaza Strip. To better understand the state of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza and the challenges to delivering humanitarian aid, Nightly spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former director of USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and former executive of the agency's Covid-19 task force. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At the moment, most aid being distributed in Gaza is organized by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is designed to replace the United Nations aid operation. Since Israel announced this plan in May, many aid organizations refused to work with the organization. Why are aid groups against GHF, and what has changed since they took over aid operations? There's three main complaints that the traditional aid apparatus — the UN-led and NGO-organized aid system that has operated pretty effectively throughout much of the war — have. First, GHF was very much pitched not as additive, but as a substitution, as an alternative. At the same time, the Israeli government is facilitating and really working kind of hand in glove with GHF. GHF even seems to operate like an extension of the IDF and the Israeli presence; they coordinate very, very closely with the IDF in Gaza. That is also being used then as a rationale by the Israeli government for suppressing the rest of the humanitarian system in Gaza. The GHF just has orders of magnitude less capacity and less reach than the traditional aid architecture had. It's not in any meaningful way, a replacement or substitution. It's run by people who are not humanitarian professionals and don't, frankly, have a background, or qualifications, or knowledge or expertise to really do that effectively. The second complaint would be that the model of the GHF puts Palestinians at enormous risk. In order to seek aid from GHF, Palestinians have to run this militarized gauntlet down [the coastal road] and then down the Morag Corridor in order to get to the aid sites. That has produced almost daily massacres. The third is that it's also just wildly inadequate relative to both the scale and the scope of the humanitarian needs in Gaza today. Gaza today is going headlong into a famine. The way you fight famine is not only with food, and this is a well-established humanitarian doctrine that when a population is moving into famine, you need to provide food, yes, but the type of food needs to be appropriately fortified and nutritious and adequately cover the full range of nutritional requirements. The GHF distribution boxes don't really do that. If you're distributing dried food aid that still needs to be prepared, then people need cooking fuel to prepare that. They need shelter and kitchen sets and places to prepare that and the goods with which to prepare it. They need clean water, both for their own drinking, sanitation, hygiene, and of course, to prepare the food. They need really specialized nutritional support, including inpatient malnutrition treatment therapies for people who reach an advanced stage of malnutrition. The pictures that have been coming out of kids in an advanced state of severe, acute malnutrition, those kids can't eat the food that GHF is distributing. Their bodies would not tolerate it at this point. And then finally you need robust health care because we know from famines past, that sometimes a majority, and certainly a large share of the people who die in famines die of disease before starvation takes them. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that GHF delivers more than a million meals a day. Does this align with what you're hearing on the ground, and what is in these dried food packs? There's not a lot of transparency about how they're reaching that number, about what's in the food packs, and about how they're calculating what constitutes a meal, even if you take that entirely at face value. I don't know, for example, what's the denominator of what they consider a meal. Is that 800 calories? How much food are they considering constitutes a meal? Of course, normally, a person needs three meals a day, and there's around 2 million people in Gaza. If you look at it that way, a million meals a day, even at face value, is maybe a sixth of the food needs that Gaza has. So, it's not remotely sufficient. It has been widely reported that thousands of aid trucks are waiting outside Gaza. What are the obstacles stopping that aid from reaching Gazans? The principal obstacle is Israeli government policy. During the ceasefire, the Israeli government would allow aid groups to drive trucks across the border directly to the where their warehouses inside Gaza through multiple points of entry around Gaza. There was enough aid that was getting in through that channel that no one had much of an incentive to try and pillage those convoys because there was sufficient aid getting in. Convoys get pillaged when people are so desperate, and they have been so deprived that they're fearful that if they don't get what's on the convoy in front of them, they don't know when or where the next round of aid will be coming from. The bottom line is, there was a system that was working. It was working well, and the Israelis shut it down when they when they were trying to put pressure on Hamas in March, they shut that system down. The variable there, what toggles that on and off, is Israeli government policy. You can just look at the difference between the aid that was going in during the ceasefire, and then what happened in March and April when nothing got in. What needs to happen to alleviate the starvation and malnutrition in Gaza? What needs to happen is a massive scale up of humanitarian access and humanitarian delivery across every part of Gaza. One of the core principles of humanitarian response is you want to bring the aid as close to where the people are as possible. You don't make the people traverse a combat zone in order to get to an aid distribution site. You bring the aid to where they are. That's very possible. Gaza is not a big place. I've overseen U.S. government responses to hunger catastrophes in Yemen, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in northeast Nigeria, and in my NGO career in Somalia with the 2011 famine as well. Those were all large, logistically complicated places with huge populations. Gaza is a tiny place with 2 million people. If humanitarian groups had access and were not being impeded from doing their work, they could scale up a very robust response, really rapidly. But the limiting factor is political obstruction of their ability to do that. If that were removed, what they would then ramp up the distribution of appropriately nutritious food and alongside that, you scale up nutrition support programs. And of course, sanitation and hygiene are really important. If no significant changes are made, what do you see as the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis? It will continue to get worse. Famines have momentum. The more malnourished, the more vulnerable a population gets, the more of them become vulnerable to dying. When you have a huge swath of the population that is in a state of significant malnutrition, and you've got a huge population of people who are succumbing to disease, succumbing to injury, the risk to them grows and grows the longer that they're in that in that situation. I think the further someone deteriorates into a state of severe malnutrition, the harder and more expensive and more time consuming it is to return them to health. What happens in a famine situation, is because as you go further down that trajectory, the number of people at risk and the amount of effort it takes to stabilize them grows exponentially, thereby, too, the risk of mortality grows exponentially the longer that it is allowed to progress. The fear that I have is that what we're seeing now in Gaza, with these daily clusters of deaths from starvation is kind of the leading edge of that exponential trajectory. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. 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Because the bill's red ink is not offset by more spending cuts or new revenue, CBO found, the legislation will drive up interest rates. — Trump again threatens India with tariffs over its trade with Russia: President Donald Trump on Monday again threatened to raise tariffs on India over its Russian oil purchases, once again infusing geopolitics and international security into his trade war economic policy. Trump's threat marks the second time in under a week that he has attacked India for its dealings with Russia. Last Wednesday, Trump announced he was issuing 25 percent tariffs on New Delhi due to what he identified as longstanding trade barriers. But he previewed an additional penalty for India's trade with Moscow in military equipment. — State Department to charge some travelers $10,000 bond to get visas: The State Department is launching a pilot program wherein it will require travelers entering the United States on tourism and business visas to pay a hefty bond as a guarantee they will not stay in the United States. In a cable sent to State Department employees Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the department will implement a 12-month pilot of a 'visa bond' program designed to target travelers from countries whose nationals have a high rate of overstaying their visas. 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New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Former NYT staffer blasts Gray Lady for ‘twisting' facts about Israeli hostage digging own grave
A former New York Times staffer on Monday slammed the Gray Lady for 'twisting' the facts about how it framed a story about an emaciated Israeli hostage being forced to dig his own grave. The liberal broadsheet — which was forced to amend a front-page article featuring an image of a supposedly starving child in Gaza — published a video on Saturday about Israeli Evyatar David being held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, without using the horrific photo of his skeletal frame. The video ran with the headline, 'Hundreds Protest in Tel Aviv After Hostage Videos Surface From Gaza,' and claimed, 'The circulation of videos created by Hamas showing Israeli hostages living in dire conditions incited families to protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a cease-fire and the return of their loved ones.' Advertisement 5 Yaakov Ort slammed his former employer, The New York Times on Facebook, calling out the newspaper's slanted coverage. Yaakov Ort/Facebook Yaakov Ort, who spent 35 years at the Times working in its creative services division, ripped his former employer over the false premise that the majority of Israelis were protesting to demand a cease-fire. 'This is an appalling twisting of the facts, and mindful, heartless concealment of the truth: Rather than running a photo of hostage Evyatar David being forced to dig his own grave by Hamas terrorists, and writing about the actual reaction of million of Israelis to seeing it, the foreign desk and photo desk ran a photo of a relative handful of protestors in Tel Aviv,' Ort wrote on his Facebook page. Advertisement Ort, who is now a senior editor at said that he has never publicly chastised his former colleagues but was aghast at the editiorial decision. 'If The Times had a Jerusalem bureau that reported the thoughts, communications and actions of the vast majority of Israelis, they would have told readers that the reaction of millions to this and other photos and videos of the physical and psychological torture of our children is not fear or protest, It is horror, rage and resolve,' he wrote 'The symbolism of the photo is so apt, since digging our own graves is exactly what the current Times news, editorial and op-ed page writers and editors, and those justifiably fearful of the Islamic street in the the West are arguing daily that we should do. Guess what? We won't.' Advertisement 5 Evyatar David was abducted on Oct. 7 at the Nova rave in southern Israel. The Times did not respond to requests for comment. David, 24, was abducted in one of the bloodiest scenes of Oct. 7. at the Nova rave in southern Israel, where more than 350 people were massacred by Hamas terrorists. David's family said in a statement to The Times that he had become a 'living skeleton, buried alive' in Hamas tunnels. Ort's outrage comes after the Times amended a story it had published containing a shocking image of a child purportedly suffering from starvation in Gaza. Advertisement In an editor's note buried in last Tuesday's edition, readers learned Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq — the Gazan boy 'diagnosed with severe malnutrition' and pictured in the article — suffers from 'pre-existing health problems.' 5 David has beeb held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023. He recently appeared in a harrowing video by Hamas. Al-Qassam Brigade Footage 'We recently ran a story about Gaza's most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition,' a spokesperson for the outlet said in a statement. 'We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems,' the rep continued. 'This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.' 5 The New York Times has been under fire for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. NurPhoto via Getty Images The image of Mohammed — shown with a gaunt face and his spine protruding from his back as his mother held him — went viral, with many using him as the poster child for starvation in the Palestinian enclave amid Israel's war against Hamas. Advertisement Days after The Times published images of Mohammed, pro-Israel group HonestReporting noted on July 27 that the boy's older brother, Joud, is standing in the background, appearing in far better condition. Mohammed's mother told CNN that her son suffers from a 'muscle disorder' for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy.
