By AFP
Mediation efforts are continuing to secure a new Gaza ceasefire despite ongoing Israeli bombardment that is “narrowing the window” for a successful outcome, Qatar’s prime minister said on Sunday.
“Our efforts as the state of Qatar along with our partners are continuing. We are not going to give up,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told the Doha Forum more than two months into the Israel-Hamas war.
Qatar was a key mediator in negotiations that resulted in a seven-day truce, which saw scores of Israeli hostages exchanged for Palestinian prisoners and humanitarian aid, until it ended at the start of the month.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the militant group killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, according to Israeli figures, in an unprecedented attack on October 7.
The Israeli offensive has killed at least 17,700 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
“We are going to continue, we are committed to have hostages released, but we are also committed to stop the war,” the Qatari premier said.
But, he added, “we are not seeing the same willingness from both parties” and “the continuation of the bombardment is just narrowing this window for us”.
Addressing the Doha Forum earlier, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the Security Council was “paralysed by geostrategic divisions” that were undermining solutions to the conflict.
UN chief’s pledge
The body’s “authority and credibility were severely undermined” by its delayed response to the war, he said two days after a US veto prevented a resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
“I reiterated my appeal for a humanitarian ceasefire to be declared,” he told the forum.
“Regrettably, the Security Council failed to do it,” he added.
“I can promise, I will not give up.”
Guterres had convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council after two months of fighting in Gaza.
He deployed the rarely used Article 99 of the United Nations Charter that allows the secretary-general to bring to the council’s attention “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”.
The rule had not been invoked by a UN chief in decades.
In a virtual address, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday that although Moscow had condemned Hamas’ October 7 attack, “we do not believe it’s acceptable to use this event for collective punishment against the millions of Palestinian people”.
Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said the United States is as responsible as Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza.
“For the United States to block a United Nations Security Council resolution, one should hold the Americans responsible” for the deadly violence, he said.
Meanwhile Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, accused Israel of dragging the region “deeper into the sea of death”.
Addressing the forum, Safadi said: “We are facing a difficult moment, a moment that will take us deeper into the sea of death and destruction, and Israel simply feels it can do that — it feels unaccountable.”
