The Qatari official underlined Israel’s refusal to all Arab proposals aimed at reaching lasting peace in Palestine, noting the region’s proposals have long been rejected by Tel Aviv.
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani has described the international community’s response to the war on Gaza as “very disappointing,” stressing the need to bring back discussions on a two-state solution.
“The response of the international community on the war in Gaza has been unfortunately very disappointing for the region and the people of the region. For the first time in recent history, we see that calling for a ceasefire became a controversial term,” Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Qatar’s foreign minister, told the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Sheikh Mohammed’s remarks came during a panel discussion on regional tensions and the ongoing war in Gaza. Since October 7, Israel has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians while injuring 61,154 others.
The Israeli genocide has reduced the coastal enclave into rubble, displacing at least 1.9 million people out of Gaza’s 2.2 million population.
When asked about Gaza’s reconstruction, Sheikh Mohammed said there is nothing left in the Strip.
“Right now and looking at the situation and the amount of bombing and destruction that happened in Gaza, around more than 23,000 people being killed, two-third of them women and children, Gaza is not there anymore. There’s nothing over there, it’s carpet bombing everywhere,” he said.
He added that reconstructing Gaza is “like rebuilding an entire city.”
“I don’t see that there is a magic word going back to the status before 7th of October and you will see all the countries coming back and injecting funds there to reconstruct it, unless we address the real issue, which is the two-state solution,” he noted.
The Qatari official underlined Israel’s refusal to all Arab proposals aimed at reaching lasting peace in Palestine, noting the region’s proposals have long been rejected by Tel Aviv.
Israel has intensified its raids in the West Bank since the beginning of the war on Gaza on October 7, killing more than 300 Palestinians while detaining more than 5,800 others, including minors.
Sheikh Mohammed highlighted those escalations, which he said received no “real reaction from the international community.”
“Maybe the media is not capturing a lot of what’s happening over there, but what’s happening in the West Bank is not better than Gaza. It’s not mass bombing, yes, but we see the killing, settler violence, we see the extremist government calling for the genocide of the Palestinian people,” he said.
The top Qatari diplomat also questioned the international community’s response and double standards towards the Israeli atrocities on the ground.
“We were always questioning what if these kinds of statements or this kind of behaviour came out of another country? Will we see this silence from the international community? I don’t think so,” he said.
