[1/7]United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan attends the opening session of the Cairo Peace Summit at the St. Regis Almasra Hotel in Cairo, Egypt, October 21, 2023. UAE Presidential Court/ Ryan Carter/ Handout via Portal acquires license rights
- Arab leaders are calling for an end to the decades-long cycle of violence
- Urgently call for renewed efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace
- Abbas says Palestinians will not leave their country
- France is pushing for an aid corridor to Gaza
CAIRO, Oct 21 (Portal) – Arab leaders condemned the Israeli bombing of Gaza at a summit in Cairo on Saturday, as the Europeans said civilians should be protected, but with Israel and senior U.S. officials absent, there was none Agreement to curb violence.
Egypt, which convened and hosted the meeting, said it had hoped participants would call for peace and resume efforts to resolve the decades-long Palestinian quest for statehood.
But the meeting ended without leaders and foreign ministers agreeing to a joint statement, two weeks into a conflict that has killed thousands and caused a humanitarian disaster in the blockaded Gaza enclave of 2.3 million people.
Diplomats attending the talks were not optimistic about a breakthrough as Israel prepared a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip to wipe out the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rampaged through its cities on October 7, killing 1,400 people.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Saturday that Israel’s air and rocket strikes had killed at least 4,385 Palestinians since the Hamas attack.
While Arab and Muslim states called for an immediate end to the Israeli offensive, Western countries mostly expressed more modest goals such as humanitarian aid for the civilian population.
Jordan’s King Abdullah condemned what he called a global silence over Israel’s attacks that have killed thousands in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and left over a million homeless, and called for a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The message the Arab world is hearing is that Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli lives,” he said, adding that he was outraged and saddened by the violence against innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Palestinians would not be displaced or driven off their land.
“We will not leave, we will not leave,” he told the summit.
France called for a humanitarian corridor to Gaza that it said could lead to a ceasefire. Britain and Germany both called on the Israeli military to show restraint, and Italy said it was important to avoid escalation.
The United States, Israel’s closest ally and a key player in all previous peace efforts in the region, sent only its chargé d’affaires to Cairo, who did not publicly speak at the meeting.
European Council President Charles Michel said the main aim of the summit was to “listen to each other”.
However, “we understand that we need to cooperate more on issues such as the humanitarian situation” to avoid regional escalation and a Palestinian-Israeli peace process, he added.
Israel has vowed to “wipe the Iranian-backed Hamas militant group from the face of the earth” after the shock October 7 attack, the deadliest Palestinian militant attack in Israel’s 75-year history.
She said she had told Palestinians to move south within the Gaza Strip for their own safety, even though the coastal strip is only 45 km (28 miles) long and Israeli airstrikes have also hit the south.
armistice
The aim of the meeting was to find out how to prevent a major regional war. But diplomats knew a public agreement would be difficult given the sensitivity of calls for a ceasefire and whether to mention Hamas’ attack and Israel’s right to defend itself.
Arab states fear the offensive could permanently drive Gazans from their homes and even into neighboring states – as happened when Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said his country opposed what he called the expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt’s largely deserted Sinai region, adding that the only solution was an independent Palestinian state.
Egypt fears insecurity near the Gaza border in northeastern Sinai, where it has faced an Islamist insurgency that peaked after 2013 and has since been largely suppressed.
Jordan, home to many Palestinian refugees and their descendants, fears that a major conflagration would give Israel the chance to expel Palestinians from the West Bank en masse.
King Abdullah said forced displacement was “a war crime under international law and a red line for all of us.”
Shortly before the opening of the summit, trucks loaded with humanitarian aid entered the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Egypt has been trying for days to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza through the border crossing, the only entry point not controlled by Israel.
Edited by Mark Heinrich, Toby Chopra and Ros Russell
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