Sheikh Mohammed says Palestinians in Gaza – not any other country – should dictate how the enclave is governed.
Qatar’s prime minister said he hoped the Palestinian Authority (PA) would return to a governing role in Gaza when the war with Israel ends.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023 after Hamas carried out an attack in southern Israel that killed at least 1,139 people, most of them civilians, according to an Tel Aviv Tribune tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel’s ferocious 15-month assault on Gaza has killed more than 47,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities, and destroyed much of the territory’s civilian infrastructure. Israel has severely restricted aid supplies to the territory, prompting warnings of a humanitarian crisis.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani was speaking at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, two days after the Gaza ceasefire that Qatar helped broker took effect .
The prime minister warned that Palestinians in Gaza – not any other country – should dictate how the enclave will be governed.
“We hope to see the Palestinian Authority again in Gaza. We hope to see a government that will really tackle the problems of the people across the way. And there is a long way to go with Gaza and the destruction,” he said.
“Wasted time”
Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Qatar’s foreign minister, said his country regretted the time lost in negotiations between Israel and Hamas.
“As we look and reflect on what we have accomplished in recent days, we really feel sorry for all the time… lost in these negotiations,” he said.
“We saw that the framework that we agreed on in December is the one that was achieved a few days ago, and… I’m talking about December 23, that just means a year of negotiating details” , declared the Prime Minister. .
He added that this included “things that are meaningless compared to the lives of the people they lost.”
How Gaza will be governed after the war was not directly addressed in the agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that ruled Gaza until the war.
The ceasefire agreement between the parties was brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States and includes a truce, the exchange of Israeli prisoners for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and an increase in humanitarian aid deliveries.
Israel has rejected any governing role for Hamas, but it has also opposed the government of the Palestinian Authority, the body created under the interim Oslo peace accords three decades ago, which has limited the governing power in parts of the occupied West Bank.
The PA, dominated by the Fatah faction created by former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, faces opposition from the rival Hamas faction, which won elections and then drove the PA from Gaza in 2007 after a brief war.
