Russian foreign minister warns of challenges in Israel-Hamas deal's second phase

Russia is getting signals that there are problems with the second phase of the implementation of the Israel-Hamas agreement, said Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Lavrov.

The top diplomat voiced the statement 16th Middle East Conference of the Valdai Discussion Club, Caliber.Az reports, citing Russian media.

“We are already receiving signals that problems with the second stage have probably already begun, because messages are being sent from the ruling circles of Israel, saying that we are not entirely satisfied with the way Hamas has fulfilled its obligations under the first stage, so we are not ruling anything out,” the minister said, noting that at the same time, “Israel continues military operations on the West Bank of the Jordan River.”

“Israel does not hesitate to continue military action in the West Bank. There are many credible leaks that Israel plans, in addition to expelling the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, to take full control of the north-west bank of the Jordan River. According to experts, and no one denies it, Israel's plans are to remain its presence on Lebanese territory and, of course, the Syrian Golan [Heights],” Lavrov said.

According to the Russian minister, the Golan Heights, with the arrival of US President Donald Trump, who in his first cadence officially declared it part of Israel, now “can also be considered lost land in terms of restoring justice, in terms of Arab-Israeli full-fledged sustainable regulation.”

He recalled that “the Trump administration, I think, has not yet clearly stated its position on this.”

“But we remember how, in addition to Israel's recognition of the Golan Heights, the Trump administration put forward and promoted another initiative, an initiative called, so to speak, the Abraham Accords, which proposed to turn the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative upside down, which envisaged the establishment of a Palestinian state in line with UN decisions, and then after that the normalisation of relations between all Arabs and Israel,” Lavrov said.

“This initiative, by the way, it originally [was the idea of] the king of Saudi Arabia, it was approved not only by the Arab League, but then also by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and at the summit that took place in Tehran. So we can say that the creation of a Palestinian state would lead to the normalisation of Israel's relations with the entire Islamic world,” the Russian minister expressed confidence.

The Russian diplomat also pointed out that “attempts to remove Russia, China and Iran from the process of external support of the Syrian settlement are hardly dictated by good intentions.” “They [the attempts] reveal the West's plans to push its competitors to secondary positions,” he added.

By Khagan Isayev