“There is no way to return to the state you were in on October 6Biden said in statements to journalists, referring to the day before the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, considered terrorist by Washington and the European Union, attacked Israel and sparked the recent war.
This message from the President of the United States was also conveyed directly by him to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, during a telephone conversation between the two last week.
“It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next and it has to be, in our view, a two-state solution,” Biden said, considering that an agreement along these lines would address Israel’s problems to solve – Palestinians must be a priority.
Regarding the two-state solution, Benjamin Netanyahu said this could be a “long and difficult” new phase.
The two-state solution – in which Israel lives together with an independent Palestinian state – has been attempted for decades by American presidents and Middle Eastern diplomats. The issue has been put on the back burner since the last US-led peace talks collapsed in 2014 over disagreements over the release of Palestinian prisoners and other issues.
The creation of a Palestinian state is something Biden rarely talked about at the start of his presidency. During his 2022 visit to the West Bank, Biden said “the ground is not yet ripe” for new efforts to achieve permanent peace, but reiterated to the Palestinians the United States’ long-standing support for statehood.
Now, at a time of heightened concern that the war between Israel and Hamas could escalate into a broader regional conflict, Biden has begun to emphasize that once the bombings and shootings stop, the push for a Palestinian state can no longer be ignored.
Until recently, Biden had placed much more emphasis on what his administration saw as the achievable ambition of normalizing relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors than on resuming peace talks.
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, causing the deaths of more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to authorities. More than 200 people were kidnapped and have remained in the hands of the Islamist group ever since.
After the attack, Israel responded with bombings and ground raids in the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas.
More than 8,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began as a result of Israel’s three-week bombing campaign, according to the Health Ministry of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Source: DN
