The EU had also sent a proposal for a peace roadmap that included holding a “preparatory conference for peace.”
Qatar attended an Arab League emergency meeting in Egypt on Monday over the ongoing Israeli crimes against Palestinians and the war in Gaza that has dragged on for nearly four months, Doha’s state news agency (QNA) reported.
The meeting took place at the level of representatives, where Qatar was represented by its envoy at the Arab League, Tariq Ali Faraj Al Ansari, according to QNA.
Al Ansari started off his speech at the meeting by paying tribute to Palestine’s government and its people while voicing Qatar’s support for “efforts within legal and counter-criminal frameworks to bring about peace” to Palestine.
The meeting came amid a regional push for an end to the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, where Israel killed at least 25,295 Palestinians and wounded 63,000 others.
During their latest meeting, the Arab League called on the United Nations Security Council to issue a “binding” resolution to halt the Israeli war in Gaza.
The resolution adopted by the Arab League called on the UNSC “to assume its responsibilities to maintain international peace and security, and to take a binding resolution to stop the widespread, systematic Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.”
The regional bloc also called on the United States as well as those “that pursue double standards and support the Israeli aggression within the Security Council, to follow positions consistent with international law to call for a complete and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza.”
Morocco’s Permanent Representative to the Arab League, Mohamed Ait Ouali, stressed the need for international pressure to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Despite the state of division among the security council and its inability to talk in a united voice, this shouldn’t stop us continuing to apply more diplomatic, political and legal pressure to stop the tragedy that the Palestinian people are going through,” the Moroccan diplomat added.
Meanwhile, the Arab League’s Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit is in Brussels for a meeting with a meeting between foreign ministers from the European Union, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
During the meeting, Palestine’s foreign minister Riyad Al-Maliki called on the EU to recognise Palestine’s statehood and end the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian news agency (Wafa) reported on Monday.
The EU had also sent a proposal for a peace roadmap that included holding a “preparatory conference for peace,” Wafa added. The conference would be held with the participation of the EU, the Arab League, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UN and the U.S.
The EU has been stressing the need to restart talks on a two-state solution while rejecting Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians.
On Monday, the EU’s Chief Josep Borrell stressed that Israel cannot build peace “by military means alone.”
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza could not be worse, and asked: “What other solutions are they thinking of? Pushing all the Palestinians to leave? Killing them?”
Displacement in Gaza has been on the rise since the beginning of the war which has reduced the besieged enclave to rubble. More than two million people out of Gaza’s 2.2 million population have been displaced and grappling with a dire humanitarian crisis.
People in Gaza barely find food to survive under the complete Israeli siege and limitations of the entry of aid, forcing Palestinians to grind animal feed to make bread.
On Saturday, the UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the humanitarian situation is also killing Palestinians in Gaza.
“People are dying not only from bombs and bullets, but from lack of food and clean water, hospitals without power and medicine, and gruelling journeys to ever-smaller slivers of land to escape the fighting,” he said.