Several Arab and European leaders stressed that a stable and secure outcome to the Israel-Palestine conflict must be built on a two-state solution. This came during the first session of what was billed by Egypt as the Cairo Peace Summit which aims to find ways to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas.
Arab presidents, royalty, and top officials from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Brazil were on hand. The US and Israel weren’t present, according to Bloomberg reports.
Initially, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi rejected the option of displacing Palestinians from Gaza. Jordan's King Abdullah also assessed that the message Arabs are taking on board is that Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones.
The Ministry of External Affairs has reiterated the call for a two-state solution and condemned the horrific terrorist attack on Israel.
"The international community must stand together in combating terrorism in all its forms and manifestations...There was also the issue of Palestine and on that, we have reiterated our position in favor of direct negotiations for establishing a two-state solution," said spokesperson Arindam Bagchi.
The Israeli response to the October 7 attack has killed thousands in Gaza and left hundreds of thousands homeless. It came in response to the killing by Hamas militants of an estimated 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, with hundreds more Israelis taken hostage and still unaccounted for.
The long-running dispute between Israel and Palestine gave rise to the two-state solution, which is fundamentally about how or whether to split the country's territory between the Jewish and Arab populations.
In simple words, the two-state solution means establishing two states for the people of two communities, that is, Israel for the Jewish people and Palestine for the Palestinian people.
According to the New York Times, in theory, this would provide the Palestinians a state while giving Israel security and preserving its Jewish majority (allowing the nation to stay democratic and Jewish).
The origin of the two-state solution was the 1978 Camp David Accords, a peace accord inked by Egypt and Israel. At first, the Palestinian Liberation Organization acknowledged Israel's rights to exist in 1988, indicating support for the two-state solution, The Print reported.
Between 1993 and 1995, Palestinians recognized the State of Israel and Israel acknowledged the PLO as its historical enemy. Subsequently, Hamas rejected the two-state solution over the years.
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