The Qatari Prime Minister, Mohamed bin Abdelrahman, denounced on Wednesday a “misuse” and “abuse” of mediation for “political objectives”, even though it is intended to achieve a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the liberation of the prisoners.
“What we seek with the debates is the release of prisoners and stopping the war. However, we have seen a misuse of this mediation for political objectives,” said Bin Abdelrahman, also Foreign Minister of Qatar, a mediating country in the conflict over hosting the political leaders of Hamas for years, at a press conference in Doha alongside his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, during which he considered the “abuse of this mediation” “unacceptable.”
The head of Qatari diplomacy lamented that “unfortunately there are big businesses with their own interests to be used for political interests for the elections.” However, Abdelrahman, who leads the Qatari negotiating delegation, did not refer to any specific country, although the mediations are also led by Egypt and the United States, which will hold presidential elections at the end of the year, while the opposition Israeli calls for elections to succeed the current Prime Minister, Beniamin Netanyahu.
“What they tell us behind closed doors changes in public,” criticized the Qatari minister, who reiterated his “commitment” to the “human objective” of reaching the truce and his rejection of this instrumentalization of the process, by which “the decision will be made.” “timely at the right time” regarding their participation in the mediations.
On this same day, the Qatari prime minister warned that the negotiations for this purpose “are going through sensitive moments” and “some stagnation,” and he regretted the escalation in the region due to the recent Iranian attack against Israel. “We are trying to overcome this stalemate as much as possible to end the suffering of Gazans and at the same time recover the hostages” held by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas since its massive attack on Israel on October 7, he added.
For his part, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, assured that the Islamist movement Hamas is willing to give up its armed wing and establish itself solely as a political party if a Palestinian state is founded on the 1967 borders. “Today [by yesterday] I spoke with the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniye, and other officials; we spoke for about three hours about the ceasefire,” Fidan said during the press conference held with Bin Abdelrahman.
He lamented that because of “Israeli propaganda,” Hamas was often portrayed as “a terrorist organization along the lines of the Islamic State, rather than as a national resistance movement.” Fidan also assured that the Israeli prime minister “is trying to drag the region into a war to stay in power.” According to the Turkish press, Ismail Haniye will meet this Saturday in Istanbul with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but Fidan did not confirm this detail.