17 January 2024
Qatar’s prime minister offered stinging criticism of Israel and the international community on Tuesday over the ongoing Israeli war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to an AP report. He also criticized the Israeli defense minister’s rejection of a cease-fire in the battered enclave.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who also serves as Qatar’s foreign minister, said a two-state solution was required to end the conflict and warned that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the Israeli response showed the region could not go back to the way it was before.
“Gaza is not there anymore. I mean, there is nothing over there,” he said, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It’s carpet bombing everywhere.”
He also brought up the ongoing tensions in the West Bank, which has seen Palestinians killed as well by Israeli security forces, and urged for an end to Palestinian divisions.
“We cannot have a two-state solution without having a government and politicians in Israel who believe in coexisting together side by side peacefully and we cannot have all this ongoing without ending this war,” he said.
He warned that a military confrontation in the Mideast waterways “will not contain” the attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels who on Monday fired a missile, striking a U.S.-owned ship just off the coast of Yemen in the Gulf of Aden.
“What we have right now in the region is a recipe of escalation everywhere,” Sheikh Mohammed added.
More than 100 days into the conflict, Palestinian authorities say the death toll in the coastal territory has passed 24,000.
