Against a backdrop of the wider international recognition of Palestinian statehood and proposals for regional de-escalation, Israel this week escalated its violence against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, with the former being seen by some UN agencies and NGOs as the venue for outright famine, genocide, and possible war crimes.
On Monday and Tuesday this week, several Western states, and four out of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council — China, Russia, France and Britain — said that they recognise a Palestinian state.
The announcements took place against the background of meetings of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York and a meeting of the International Alliance to Implement the Two-State Solution that was also co-hosted in New York on Monday by Saudi Arabia and France. Other statements were made during speeches before the UNGA meeting, which opened on Tuesday.
However, despite the wide media coverage they attracted, the statements of recognition fell short of having immediate consequences. None of the UN Security Council members, including France, said it would call for a UN Security Council meeting to follow the diplomatic gestures with a vote to make Palestine a member state of the UN.
There is also considerable, and possibly deliberate, ambiguity about what this recognition will actually mean.
Over 150 of the UN’s 190 member states have now decided to recognise the State of Palestine. However, at the same time representatives of the Palestinian Authority (PA) were denied entry visas to the US to take part in this year’s UNGA meetings, despite the fact that Palestine had been accorded non-member observer status at the UNGA since 2012 by 135 votes.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was denied an entry visa into the US. He was forced to address Monday’s meeting on the two-state solution by video conference after a UNGA Resolution.
The US tried to bar the transmission of the statement via video conference, but a UNGA vote, with 145 members in favour, allowed Abbas to address the top diplomatic event. Until Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, US President Donald Trump was expected to meet with representatives from several Arab and Muslim-majority countries on Tuesday on the margins of the UNGA meetings.
In his video conference statement, Abbas called for an international conference to be held on achieving peace in the Middle East. He called for an end to the war on Gaza, with arrangements being made that would allow for the reconstruction of the Strip and the introduction of a new governing body to replace Hamas.
However, according to informed Arab and European diplomatic sources, this is unlikely to take place. In the words of one European diplomat, “Trump is not interested” in an end to the war or in reconstruction and is only interested, according to these sources, in finding a way to end the Israeli war on Gaza in a way that fits Israeli priorities, among them support for the repeated US veto on efforts to establish a Palestinian state.
Informed diplomatic sources said at the beginning of the week that what Trump is planning to offer in the Tuesday meeting will in essence be a demand to put pressure on Hamas to disarm, hand over the remaining Israeli hostages, pull out of Gaza, and find a formula for an Arab/Islamic takeover of the administration and security of southern Gaza where the vast majority of Palestinians would be clustered pending the beginning of their exit to other states.
Trump, the same sources added, was also expected to ask the Arab Gulf states to finance this Gaza operation.
According to the same sources, addressing the Palestinian right to statehood was not on the American agenda, either at the Tuesday meeting or later. On Monday, while the UN was hosting the conference sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia on the two-state solution, the White House reiterated its opposition to the recognition of a Palestinian state.
“The president has been very clear. He disagrees with this decision,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. She added that Trump “feels this does not do anything to release the [Israeli] hostages, which is the primary goal right now in Gaza”.
In his close to one-hour statement on Tuesday before the UNGA, the longest he has ever delivered, Trump said that the recognition of a Palestinian state amounted to a “reward” for Hamas and worked against chances to end the war in Gaza.
Trump said he wanted all the Israeli hostages, and the bodies of the dead hostages, to be handed over to Israel.
Meanwhile, no major breakthrough was announced immediately after Trump meeting with a limited group of Arab and Muslim leaders, even though both Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoga, who took part in the meeting, said that the discussion was fruitful.
According to the European diplomat, “what is happening here [in New York] is just symbolic. It is a message of solidarity with the Palestinian people, but it will not change anything on the ground because there is no way to get” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war on Gaza and negotiate for peace.
On Monday and Tuesday, Israeli officials, including the ambassador of Israel to the UN, were openly saying that Israel will not stop its attacks on Gaza before eliminating Hamas and pushing the Palestinians to the south of the Strip.
In remarks on X, Hanan Ashrawi, a leading Palestinian politician, wrote that “the recognition of Palestine must not be underestimated or dismissed,” however. Ashrawi, who was a member of the Palestinian negotiating team at the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, added that such recognition signals “a sea change in the world that has hitherto granted… Israel impunity [with its] ongoing genocide.”
“The real irony,” Ashrawi said, is that “Israel is hell bent on eradicating Palestine and its people” and the world needs to act to stop it.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the conference in New York on Monday that sanctions need to be imposed on Israel to bring it round to end its two-year genocidal war on Gaza.
In her statement before the conference, EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas referred to possible bilateral sanctions that member states of the EU could impose on Israel. Last week, the European Commission issued a package of proposed sanctions to be imposed on Israel for its ongoing military assault on Gaza.
President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, whose country launched a legal process against Israel’s genocidal practices in Gaza before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last year, told the conference that the “separation wall” that Israel has built on Palestinian Territories in the West Bank should be removed.
“There is no question that the US is going to go all the way to defend Israel and punish all attempts to put pressure on Israeli practices, but this does not change the fact that Israel is really isolated politically in the international arena,” said one Egyptian diplomat.
Speaking from New York, the diplomat said that this isolation “is very clear” not just in the statements that world leaders have made before the conference but also in the interaction with Israeli delegates in the corridors of the UN.
“It is very clear that the world is showing its frustration with the carnage that is ongoing in Gaza, and it is also showing its opposition to the displacement schemes that Israel is [executing] against the Gazans,” he commented.
In his statement before the two-state solution conference, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli reiterated Egypt’s firm opposition to the displacement of the Palestinian people from their land. Earlier this month, Netanyahu criticised Egypt for not opening its borders with Gaza to allow Palestinians to leave.
This week, Israel intensified its military strikes on Gaza and particularly on Gaza City in order to forcibly evict Gazans to the southern part of the Strip where they would suffer from dire conditions, including shortages of food and medical facilities.
According to a senior source in an international health organisation, close to one third of the Gaza population, still in the northern part of the Strip, have only ten per cent of the basic medical care they desperately need.
The rest, clustered in less than 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip on the orders of the Israeli occupation, have only 40 per cent of the basic medical care they need, the source said.
“Netanyahu is making life unbearable for those in the north in order to force them to move to the south, and he is making the lives of those in the south increasingly unbearable in order to make it inevitable that they will want to break away from Gaza somehow and sometime sooner rather than later,” the source concluded.
Netanyahu is expected to meet with Trump on 29 September.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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