RAMALLAH: Palestinian officials said yesterday that their draft resolution setting November 2016 as the deadline for ending Israel’s occupation of lands sought for a Palestinian state still doesn’t have majority backing in the UN Security Council.
The draft is part of a series of Palestinian diplomatic campaigns at the United Nations. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he would present such a resolution to the 15-member Council, but did not give a date.
He and his advisers would consider a nine-vote majority in favour of the resolution as a diplomatic victory even though the US is likely to veto and block such a resolution.
The draft resolution is an expression of Palestinian frustration with the repeated failure of US-led negotiations with Israel on the terms of a Palestinian state. The last round broke down in the spring, after nine months of fruitless talks in which the two sides couldn’t agree on the ground rules.
The Palestinians want to set up a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967. They have said they are willing to consider small border modifications, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to recognize the pre-1967 line as a basis for negotiations.
The proposed Security Council resolution would set a deadline for an Israeli withdrawal.
Since the collapse of US-led peace talks with Israel in April, the Palestinians have been pursuing a new diplomatic path to independence via the United Nations and by joining international organisations. The Palestinians won the status of UN observer state in 2012.
On Wednesday evening, Abbas met with senior members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and his Fatah movement in Ramallah to discuss a request by US Secretary of State John Kerry to put off any Security Council initiative until the beginning of next year, participants said.
Kerry made the request in a meeting with Abbas earlier this week, said senior PLO members Wasel Abu Yousef and Taysir Khaled. Participants in Wednesday’s meeting opposed granting Kerry’s request, but no decision was made on when to seek a vote on the resolution. Some said it could be later this month or by mid-November.
Currently, only seven Security Council members would likely vote for the resolution, according to Khaled and Abu Yousef. Khaled said those in favour are Russia, China, Jordan, Chad, Chile, Nigeria and Argentina. He said France and Luxembourg are being courted to reach nine votes. It is not clear if Abbas would proceed at the Security Council with the needed majority.
Meanwhile, the head of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group, praised Iran for its role in last summer’s Gaza conflict against Israel, during a visit to Tehran yesterday. “Definitely, the victory was achieved with the assistance of the Islamic republic,” Ramadan Abdullah Shallah said at a meeting with Iran’s supreme guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quoted by Fars news agency.
“Without Iran’s strategic and efficient help, resistance and victory in Gaza would have been impossible,” he said of the 50-day war in which 2,200 Gazans and 73 Israelis died and the Palestinian territory was devastated.
Iran, an arch-foe of Israel, provides the technology for Palestinian fighters of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, a larger Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip, to fire missiles at towns in the Jewish state. Khamenei, also quoted by Fars, urged the militants to “boost their preparedness day by day and reinforce their resources” ahead of any further Israeli assault on the territory.
The Islamic Jihad leader was sceptical of the $5.4bn in international aid to rebuild Gaza that was pledged at a donor conference in Cairo last Sunday. “We do not pin much hope on such promises and only rely on God to compensate losses inflicted on us by the Zionist regime,” said Shallah.
League chief plan
In a related development, Arab League chief Nabil Al Arabi will lead a ministerial delegation to Gaza on October 23, an official said. The delegation will include Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al Sabah and Mauritanian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ould Teguedi, the League official told reporters in Cairo.
“The visit is in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, which was subjected to comprehensive destruction by the last Israeli aggression, and to understand its needs,” the official said. Details of the itinerary were not immediately available.
The one-day visit comes after an international donors conference in Cairo hosted by Egypt and Norway pledged $5.4bn to rebuild Gaza. Donations mainly included $1bn from Qatar, $212m from the United States and ¤450m from the European Union.
Agencies
