The United Nations hosted a preparatory meeting on Friday for an upcoming conference on imposing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The horrors we have witnessed in Gaza for over nineteen months should spur us to urgent action to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said U.N. General Assembly President Philémon Yang of Cameroon at the meeting. “The devastating cycles of death, destruction and displacement cannot be allowed to continue.”
The conference, which is set to take place June 17-20 in New York, is sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia. Organizers have said the goal is to produce an action-oriented outcome document detailing irreversible steps and concrete measures toward implementing a two-state solution.
Friday’s meeting aimed to set expectations and finalize next month’s program.
“We must urgently move from words to deeds. We must move from ending the war in Gaza to ending the conflict itself,” Anne-Claire Legendre, Middle East and North Africa adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron, said on Friday.
Manal bint Hassan Radwan, who leads Saudi Arabia’s negotiating team, said that Friday’s meeting must “chart a course for action, not reflection.”
Efforts to bring about an end to the Israel-Hamas war must be “anchored in a credible and irreversible political plan that addresses the root cause of the conflict and offers a real path to peace, dignity and mutual security,” she said.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is slated to speak at the June conference’s plenary session, and member states and observers are invited.
Macron has indicated France could recognize a Palestinian state during the conference, drawing the ire of Israeli authorities, who insist such recognition, and even the conference itself, is a reward for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, which touched off the last 19 months of war.
“Hamas is a genocidal death cult not interested in peace,” Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesman to the United Nations, told JNS. “Peace in the region will come when 58 of our hostages are returned home from brutal captivity and when Hamas, which ignited the conflict we are now in with the Oct. 7 massacre, no longer reigns as a political entity holding the Gazan population hostage.”
While the Israeli mission has not yet given an indication as to whether it plans to participate in next month’s conference, Harounoff said that “Diplomatic discussions around peace that don’t urgently address and work to resolve these issues will be futile.”
