Qatar is where Hamas and Mossad negotiated a short-lived pause in fighting last month, allowing the release of more than three hundred hostages and prisoners in Gaza and Israel. Qatar is also the place where this Sunday the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, expressed his frustration over the resumption of the war. “The Security Council is paralyzed by geostrategic divisions,” he lamented, two days after the US rejected its request for a ceasefire in that body, after having invoked Article 99 for the first time.
“I am not giving up,” he declared anyway, at the opening of the Doha Forum, despite recognizing that this paralysis negatively affects the resolution of this and other wars, “in Ukraine or Burma.”
The senior Portuguese official has described the situation in Gaza as an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” and has had a memory for the 130 employees of UNRW – the UN agency for Palestine refugees – who have died due to the bombings of the Israeli army. UNRW, by the way, has been the award-winning organization in this edition of the Qatari forum.
“The health system is collapsing and there is no protection for civilians in Gaza,” Guterres said. “I fear that public order will soon enter a total crisis,” to which he adds “even worse developments, including epidemic diseases and greater pressure for mass displacement towards Egypt.” Something, according to him, “with potentially irreversible consequences for the Palestinians and for peace and security in the region.”
In this sense, António Guterres has criticized “the thunderous silence” with which the UN Security Council responded to “the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, followed by the unrepentant Israeli bombing of Gaza.” In his opinion, this silence, over the course of a month, “severely undermined the authority and credibility of the Security Council.” To make matters worse, “its resolution is not being applied.”
“The motto of this forum, ‘Building shared futures’, could not be more timely,” concluded Guterres, before a thousand guests from around the world and the Emir of Qatar. The latter, who in the 2022 edition of the Doha Forum made a passionate defense of the Palestinian cause, has remained in a discreet background in this conclave, delegating the floor, as a potential host of new negotiations.
It should be said that the senior staff of Hamas has lived in Qatar since it was expelled from Syria in 2012, after supporting the revolt against Bashar al-Assad by his Muslim Brotherhood co-religionists.
Immediately after Guterres, the prime ministers of Qatar and Palestine and the Foreign Minister of Jordan spoke at the Forum, highlighting the role that this small gas emirate with great geopolitical ambitions – it is also home to the Al Jazeera network – plays in the Middle East. .
