Doha, Qatar: Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani has said there is no reason for the continuation of war in Gaza.
The Prime Minister was speaking at a session on “Towards Stability and Peace in the Middle East: De-escalation Challenge” at Munich Security Conference 2024 in Germany yesterday.
Discussing the Gaza situation, he said: “We see no reason for continuation of the war in the first place. We know the importance and we recognise the importance to have a deal on the hostages and get the hostages back to their families.”
But also, the Prime Minister said: “We recognise the importance of stopping the war today, even without any preconditions. And we believe that stopping the war will bring hostages back.” He said hostage deal will bring an end to the war, but we would like to see this is happening without any further excuses.
“This is the dilemma that we’ve seen and unfortunately this is being misused by a lot of countries that in order to get a ceasefire, it is conditional to have the hostage deal. It shouldn’t be conditional.”
The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs said: “We made some good progress in the last few weeks in the negotiations on Gaza. We’ve been trying to reach an agreement between the two parties, yet the last few days have not been progressing as expected.”
He said there are still differences. “If we look at basically the agreements that we had earlier in November when we managed to get 109 hostages out and we had this humanitarian pause for a week.”
The Prime Minister said there are two elements in any agreement, one is addressing the humanitarian condition in Gaza and the other one reflects the number of people who will be released in exchange for the hostages.
“In this agreement we are talking at a bigger scale and we still see some difficulties on the humanitarian part of these negotiations... Now, if we are able to reach in the next few days some good conditions on that side, I believe that we can see a deal happening very soon.”
He said that the pattern in the last few days is not really very promising, but we will always remain optimistic, pushing and trying our best to get closer to this.
“The humanitarian suffering on both sides is not something easy to be handled. That is the humanitarian situation, and especially when it comes to Rafah. And now we see the population over there, it’s a dire situation and we are seeing a very threatening moment if the plan happens,” the Prime Minister added.
He added: “If we can address and signify the humanitarian package within the agreement, we will be able to get through the obstacle of the numbers, that’s basically our focus is this.
"To be realistic when we are going to start a negotiation about the Palestinian state or the Palestinians’ future, If we look back in the last three decades, we’ve seen that we are just going into a cycle which never resulted in anything or any progress.
"On the contrary, we have seen an increase in the number of settlements. We have seen continuous violations at the holy sites. We’ve seen provocations happening from time to time. We have seen that how many wars that we’ve been through in the last 30 years."
The Prime Minister added: "We hope that this, and what happened after October 7th and the war represent a wake-up call that the situation is not sustainable and we need to step up and look at a better future for the people in the region, whether it’s Palestinians, Arabs, or Israelis. We want to see a better future for everyone.
“Now on the issue of Hamas being part of the problem or being part of the solution, what we are talking about, we are talking about the Palestinian representatives."
The Prime Minister said: That’s basically the PLO or the one who is representing the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and everywhere around the world.
“They are the organisation that’s mandated for the negotiations and I believe that whoever the Palestinians are agreed on should be included in that and it’s the Palestinian decision to decide who’s being part of them or not. And I think Palestinians have the same right as any other People or any other country to choose whoever is participating with them or not.
“We are on crossroads right now and it’s very critical that we stand for a rules-based international order... We would like to see a unified Palestinian government that represents the Palestinian people that will be in the West Bank and Gaza, and of course all the Palestinians who are willing to recognise and subscribe to the principles of the PLO needed to be included and needed to be a representative organisation for all the Palestinian people until they get into their statehood.”
