Gaza is beyond a “humanitarian crisis” and “on the verge of a total systems failure,” UN Mideast envoy Nickolay Mladenov said Tuesday.
Speaking at the INSS annual conference in Tel Aviv, Mladenov defined a total systems failure as the “full collapse of the economy and social services,” with all the “political, humanitarian and security implications stemming from that.”
Mladenov said that the situation in Gaza needed to be high on the priority of the donor countries to the PA meeting in Brussels on Tuesday for an emergency meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee to address the Palestinian funding crisis, Gaza and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“Returning Gaza under legitimate Palestinian control and ending all the militant activity there is critical,” he said. “It is critical to Israel’s security, Egypt’s security, to the people of Gaza and the Palestinians in general.”
The envoy said it was important that one of the key messages to come out of Wednesday’s meeting is that “we need to work with the PA, and we need to support their plan and help them develop a plan about how they are going to return to Gaza.”
Without that, he said, Gaza risks “exploding in our faces again, this time in a far more violent and deadly manner than in the past.”
Mladenov said that despite the current challenges, “I don’t believe the peace process is dead, or that the prospect for peace is dead.” He said that in the past there have been lower levels of trust between the sides, and much higher levels of violence. He also noted that neither side has formally withdrawn from the Oslo accords, and that key institutions set up by that agreement remain in place.
He stressed, however, that from the UN’s perspective, the two-state solution is the only viable option, and that “there is no Plan B.”
#Peace requires a two state solution; a two state solution requires #negotiations; the resumption of meaningful negotiations requires the right conditions; and creating those conditions requires transformative steps by both #Israelis and #Palestinians. @INSSIsrael #INSS2018
— Nickolay E. MLADENOV (@nmladenov) January 30, 2018
Solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue, he said, is also key to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, and this will be necessary “if we want to reach and reap the benefits of Arab-Israeli cooperation.”
Mladenov said that today neither the Israelis nor Palestinians are in a position to sit down and have meaningful negotiations, and that what needs to be done is create the conditions that will be conducive to talks. This means reducing “negative trends on the grounds,” such as Palestinian violence, terror and incitement, and Israel’s continued construction of settlements, placing limits on Palestinian development in Area C and demolition of Palestinian structures.
Article source: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.834358
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