Tony Blair, a founding member of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, told the U.N Security Council on Tuesday that the organization had made “substantial progress” in implementing Washington’s peace plan for the Gaza Strip.
Blair pointed at the formation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) and the International Stabilization Force (ISF), which he said recently completed its “pre-deployment assessment mission,” as key milestones in implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan that ended the two-year-long war with the Hamas terrorist organization.
“The critical demilitarization talks with Hamas are continuing, led with immense effort by the mediators Egypt, Qatar and Turkey together with High Representative [for Gaza Nickolay] Mladenov and representatives of the Board of Peace,” according to the former British prime minister.
Senior Hamas leaders like Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk have rejected key parts of Washington’s peace plan in recent months, including disarmament, despite having agreed to the proposal in October.
The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s “military wing,” earlier this month denounced calls for its disarmament under the ceasefire plan as “extremely dangerous.”
Blair told the Security Council on Tuesday that Hamas, “as presently constituted,” can have no role in administering Gaza. “Not directly running the government of Gaza. Not indirectly by retaining their weapons and therefore their power,” he said.
“Were Hamas to change, to agree that the goal of a Palestinian state should be pursued through political negotiation and that such a state should live in peace with the State of Israel, it would be free to engage with the politics of Gaza as with any other party which accepts these internationally agreed principles,” he said. “But until it does so, it cannot.”
Blair added, “Hamas—and every other armed group in Gaza—should disarm, decommission weapons as part of a Palestinian-led process with monitored and verified implementation.”
Once Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terror organizations agree to disarm, Israeli restrictions on people and goods entering the Strip “should and will be lifted,” vowed the official, calling it “a huge prize for the people of Gaza.”
Senior members of the Board of Peace were set to meet with Hamas representatives in Cairo this week for talks on disarmament, Israeli media reported on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari told reporters in Doha on Tuesday that “we are continuing our role in the mediation” between Hamas and Israel.
“There is momentum in the talks, with the developments that are taking place, and we are part of that momentum,” he said, responding to reports that Qatar stopped its mediation.
