UN conference to push for two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations chief on Thursday urged world leaders and officials attending an upcoming U.N. conference on ending the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict “to keep the two-state solution alive.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters that the international community must not only support a solution where independent states of Palestine and Israel live side-by-side in peace but “materialize the conditions to make it happen.”

France and Saudi Arabia are co-chairing the conference, which the U.N. General Assembly is holding from June 17 to June 20 in New York. French President Emmanuel Macron will attend and other leaders are expected, but Israel will not be there.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the creation of a Palestinian state, a position that was overwhelmingly adopted by Israel’s parliament in a vote last year.

“We won’t be taking part in a conference that doesn’t first urgently address the issue of condemning Hamas and returning all of the remaining hostages brutally taken by Hamas in Gaza, which along with the massacring of 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals on Oct. 7, 2023, was what triggered this conflict to begin with,” Jonathan Harounoff, the Israeli Mission’s international spokesperson, told The Associated Press.

Netanyahu has also opposed a one-state solution, which would reduce Israel’s Jewish majority with the West Bank and Gaza’s Palestinian populations. Instead, he has advocated for annexing large parts of the West Bank, without including Palestinians.

Guterres said the current violence makes a two-state solution all the more necessary.

“My message to world leaders and delegations is that it is absolutely essential to keep alive the two-state solution perspective with all the terrible things we are witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank,” Guterres said.

“And for those that doubt about the two-state solution, I ask: What is the alternative?” the secretary-general said. “Is it a one-state solution in which either the Palestinians are expelled or the Palestinians will be forced to live in their land without rights? That would be totally unacceptable.”

At a May 23 preparatory meeting, both co-chairs called for action, not more words.

Anne-Claire Legendre, Middle East adviser to Macron, said that while the international community must support efforts to end the war in Gaza and release the hostages, it must also urgently put a political solution “front of mind.”

Manal Radwan, an adviser to Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry, said action is critical because the conference is taking place “at a moment of historic urgency” and “unimaginable suffering” in Gaza.

Israel’s military campaign since Oct. 7, 2023, has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants. The offensive has destroyed large parts of Gaza and displaced around 90% of its population of roughly 2 million Palestinians.

“This conference must be the beginning of the end of the conflict,” Radwan said. And Israel’s occupation “must end for peace and prosperity to prevail in the region.”

The co-chairs said in a document sent to U.N. members before the preparatory meeting that the primary goal of the conference is to identify actions by “all relevant actors” to implement the two-state solution — and, more importantly, “to urgently mobilize the necessary efforts and resources to achieve this aim, through concrete and timebound commitments.”

One of the aims at the conference is to increase the number of countries recognizing Palestine as an independent state. So far, more than 145 of the 193 U.N. member nations have done so. The Palestinians view their state as encompassing Gaza and the West Bank with east Jerusalem as the capital.

Macron has said France should move toward recognizing a Palestinian state. “And therefore in the coming months we will,″ he told broadcaster France-5 in April after he returned from a trip to Egypt, where he pressed for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Netanyahu said in a statement after talking to Marcon on April 15 that he strongly objected to establishing a Palestinian state, saying it would be “a huge reward for terrorism” after the Oct. 7 attacks and would be “a stronghold of Iranian terrorism” minutes away from Israeli cities.

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Lee Keath in Cairo and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.