Leaders and representatives of around thirty countries discussed this Saturday a possible ‘road map’ to stop the war between Israel and Hamas, and tried to find mechanisms to be able to continuously provide humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. The meeting, sponsored by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi, was attended by representatives of European and Arab governments, as well as the President of the European Council, Charles Michel; the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell; and the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres. The summit was marked by the absent countries, key to reaching a ceasefire, a measure that many of the attending countries indicated as necessary. Israel did not attend the summit and neither did its main ally, the United States. Also absent was Iran, the main supporter of the Palestinian group Hamas, which is feared could intervene in the conflict and cause an escalation of violence in the region.
The difference in political positions regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the condemnation of the actions of one side or the other stood out throughout the meeting, making it difficult to achieve a common proposal.
During his speech, the acting president, Pedro Sánchez, urged to achieve a “humanitarian ceasefire” like the one António Guterres proposed minutes before. “This ongoing spiral of violence cannot continue; it is time for the international community to act,” he said. “We must focus on what is urgent and what is important, we need to protect the civilian population,” added Sánchez, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council.
The acting president is one of the few European leaders who has not traveled to Jerusalem to show his support for the Israeli authorities. However, he did not hesitate to again condemn the “terrorist Hamas” attack and stressed “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Likewise, he also called for respecting the needs of the Palestinian population and the protection of civilians in the region. He urged to protect the rights of “all civilians” and made reference to the 200 hostages that Hamas is holding captive, but also to the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who have been suffering from Israeli bombing for two weeks. After his intervention, Sánchez held a bilateral meeting with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas. “I have conveyed our support and solidarity with the suffering of the population in Gaza,” said Sánchez in a publication on the social network two-state solution,” he reiterated.
During the summit, Abbas called for the opening of humanitarian corridors and rejected pressure from Israel to transfer part of Gaza’s population to other territories. “We will not leave and we will remain in our land,” he declared. For their part, both the UN and the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni; and his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, called for a ‘roadmap’ towards a two-state solution. Guterres, for his part, welcomed the sending of twenty trucks of humanitarian aid to Gaza, after days of negotiations between the United States, Israel, Egypt and the UN. Israel prevented the opening of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, but finally allowed the entry of an aid convoy this Saturday. “The people of Gaza need a commitment to much, much more: a continued delivery of aid to Gaza at the scale they need. We are working with all relevant parties to make this happen,” said the UN secretary general during the summit. . The head of UK diplomacy, James Cleverly, reiterated his support for Israel. “The United Kingdom is clear and has always been clear that Israel has the right to self-defense and the right to secure the release of those who were kidnapped on October 7,” he said.
Arab leaders, on the other hand, unanimously condemned the Israeli bombings and barely mentioned the two-state solution. They focused on finding solutions to avoid a regional escalation of the conflict and tried to call their own citizens to calm, after the massive protests that have broken out in the region for the Palestinian cause. Egyptian President Al Sisi was “astonished” by the fact that the world can take “a step back and watch a humanitarian catastrophe unfold” that he called “collective punishment” of the Palestinian population. The Egyptian president reiterated that the solution does not involve punishing the Egyptian population, alluding to the insistence of Israel – Cairo’s ally in the region – to host one million Palestinian refugees from Gaza in the Sinai desert. In the last week, Egypt and Jordan have intensified their diplomatic efforts to avoid being affected by the regional escalation unleashed by the war between Israel and Hamas. Amman and Cairo were the first Arab and regional countries to normalize relations with Israel and have trade deals with the country, but fear that the conflict will cross their borders. Both also host a large number of refugees, who were forced into exile after the wars of 1948 and 1967 and who, to this day, have not been able to return to their land due to the territorial and bureaucratic blockade imposed by Israel.
