25 Jul. 24: The UAE, US and Israel met in Abu Dhabi on Thursday to discuss post-war plans for Gaza, a day after a senior Emirati diplomat signalled that the UAE was prepared to send peacekeeping forces to the besieged enclave, reports Middle East Eye.
The meeting was hosted by Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and attended by the White House’s top Middle East official, Brett McGurk, State Department counsellor Tom Sullivan, and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, according to Axios.
The meeting came on the heels of an opinion article published in the Financial Times that backed the deployment of a temporary international force in Gaza to provide “law and order”.
Lana Nusseibeh, the UAE’s former ambassador to the United Nations, now an assistant minister for political affairs in the UAE, said an international force could be sent to Gaza at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority as part of efforts to achieve a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It was not immediately clear why the UAE decided to lay out its vision for the Gaza Strip a day before the previously undisclosed meeting with senior US and Israeli officials.
But at least some of Nusseibeh’s pre-conditions for a peacekeeping force in Gaza appear to contradict the stated positions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Nusseibeh, who hails from a prominent Jerusalem family, said an international force would not bring stability to Gaza unless Israel lifts its blockade of the Gaza Strip and ends settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.
Her call for the international force to be a stepping stone towards a two-state solution also directly challenges the Israeli Knesset, which overwhelmingly voted to reject a Palestinian state last week.
Analysts are sceptical about whether the US can recruit Gulf states to provide security and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, particularly as Israel continues to batter the enclave and talks on a ceasefire stall. However, privately, US and Arab officials who have spoken to MEE suggest that some tentative progress has been made.
