Several European states, some “interested” Arab countries and the United States are working on a unified Palestinian government model that could attract funds for reconstruction, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said Tuesday in an interview in the city. Switzerland in Davos, where the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is being held this week. Norway argues that a unified Palestinian territory should be run by the Palestinian Authority, but “first and foremost, it has to be what the Palestinians want,” Barth Eide added.
Norway acted as a facilitator in the 1992-1993 peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that led to the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian Authority, created under that agreement, now exercises limited self-government in the West Bank and held talks with Israel on a Palestinian state before they collapsed in 2014.
Since the Oslo talks, Norway has chaired a donor group that coordinates international aid to the Palestinian territories, the AHLC, and has worked to try to revive a diplomatic channel between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Norwegian foreign minister said that working on a two-state solution was increasingly urgent as the conflict spread across the region, but that only the United States and the Israeli people could influence Israel’s position. “What we can do is work for Palestinian unity and think about models with interested countries,” added the senior official from the Nordic country.
Calls for a two-state solution have grown following the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which Hamas gunmen killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, prompting an Israeli bombardment and ground offensive on Gaza. , governed by Hamas, in which, according to the territory’s health authorities, more than 24,000 people have died.
