UAE says US need to press for an early ceasefire in Gaza
The president of the United Arab Emirates’ diplomatic advisor said on Saturday that Washington must press for an expedient conclusion to the Israel-Hamas conflict and a fresh approach to resolving the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, failing which Washington would be seen as ineffectual.
The two-decade Israeli approach of containing the Palestinian problem has failed, according to Anwar Gargash, who also criticized Israel for its “disproportionate” reaction to the Oct. 7 strike by the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
Arab powers, alarmed by Israel’s shelling of the Gaza Strip and its siege of the coastal Palestinian enclave, are worried about the significant increase in civilian deaths and the restricted access to humanitarian supplies.
At a policy conference in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Gargash said, “US involvement will be seen by when we end this war, the quicker the better, and whether we can have another…, sort of process at problem solving, at issue solving.”
“If this crisis continues, and especially the humanitarian side, and if this crisis, brings us back full circle, to the old containment policy of pre-Seventh of October, I think the American role here… is not going to be seen as effective,” he said.
A dominant Gulf Arab nation, the UAE is one of the US’s closest allies in the Middle East, hosting US soldiers and, in the last ten years, has pursued a more autonomous and aggressive foreign policy.
It was the most well-known Arab nation to sign the 2020 Abraham Accords, a deal mediated by Washington that ended decades of pan-Arab policy that demanded the creation of a Palestinian state prior to normalization and established diplomatic relations with Israel.
“HUMANITARIAN WARMTHORNE”
One of the most well-known foreign policy analysts in the United Arab Emirates, Gargash, has advocated for a return to an approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that takes into account borders, refugees, and East Jerusalem.
On October 7, terrorists from Hamas crossed the border and launched an assault on Israeli villages, sparking the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Israel claims to have captured over 200 captives and murdered 1,400 people, the most of them civilians. Following that, Israel bombarded the 2.3 million-person tiny, densely populated Palestinian territory, killing at least 9,488 people—3,900 of them children, according to Gaza health officials.
A humanitarian ceasefire, which Gargash said he thought would be more realistically achieved than a complete ceasefire – rejected by Israel and its allies – and not be vetoed by “any of the participants” is something that the UAE has been pressing for out of worry that the war may explode into a larger regional conflict.
Referring to Friday’s address by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, Gargash said that anything that does not intensify the war is a good step.
