Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, who is also Foreign Minister, today at Davos, said that the international community needs to hold Israel’s feet to the fire on the two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by locking Israel into a process with a deadline. “It needs to be time-bound, it needs to be irreversible. We cannot leave this just at the hand of the Israelis…. All of us, we are showing our willingness to extend our hands, to have a peace agreement with Israel, if they are willing to engage genuinely in a process that will make the Palestinians have their state at the end.”
Otherwise, Al-Thani said that the negotiations around a ceasefire-for-hostages deal, which Qatar had been mediating, were “going through a lot of difficulty…. Gaza is not there anymore. I mean, there is nothing over there. It’s carpet-bombing everywhere.” He also singled out the U.S. and British military strikes on Houthi rebel sites in Yemen with the warning that the conflict would continue to metastasize unless fighting in Gaza halted. “We need to address the central issue, which is Gaza, in order to get everything else defused … if we are just focusing on the symptoms and not treating the real issues, [solutions] will be temporary. What we have right now in the region is a recipe of escalation everywhere.”
