Qatar’s prime minister hopes the Palestinian Authority will return to Gaza when the war ends News from Gaza
Sheikh Mohammed says the 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 play a governing role in Gaza when Israel’s war ends.
Israel launched a war against Gaza on October 7, 2023, after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel that killed at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera report based on Israeli data.
Israel’s fierce 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 the delivery of aid to the territory, leading to warnings of a humanitarian crisis.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani was speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, two days after a ceasefire helped broker by Qatar came into effect in Gaza.
The prime minister warned that the Palestinians in Gaza – not any other country – should dictate how the enclave is governed.
“We hope to bring the PA back to Gaza. We hope to see a government that will really address the problems of the people there. And there is a long way to go with Gaza and the destruction,” he said.
‘Spent Time’
Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Qatar’s foreign minister, said his country was sorry for the time lost in negotiations between Israel and Hamas.
“When we look and think about what we have achieved in the last few days, we were really sorry for all the time … wasted in these negotiations,” he said.
“We saw that the framework we agreed on in December is the one that was implemented a few days ago, and … I’m talking about December ’23, that means only one year of negotiations on the details,” said the Prime Minister.
He added that it included “some meaningless things compared to the lives of the people they lost.”
How Gaza will be governed after the war was not directly mentioned in the agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that governed Gaza until the war.
The ceasefire agreement between the parties was brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States and includes a ceasefire, an exchange of Israeli prisoners for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and an increase in humanitarian aid deliveries.
Israel has rejected any governing role for Hamas, but has also opposed the rule of the Palestinian Authority, a body established under the Oslo interim peace accords three decades ago, which has limited 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 faction Hamas, which prevailed in elections and then drove the PA out of Gaza in 2007 after a brief war.
