Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi called for a resumption of Israel-Palestinian peace talks when he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York City late on Wednesday, al-Sisi’s office said yesterday.
Netanyahu, writing on Twitter, said his talks with al-Sisi focused on “regional developments,” but he did not elaborate.
At the meeting at his hotel in New York, al-Sisi “stressed the importance of resuming the negotiations between the two sides, the Palestinians and the Israelis, to reach a just and a comprehensive solution based on a two-state solution and in accordance with the international treaties,” the presidential office statement said.
Egypt has also been working to broker a long-term ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza Strip’s dominant Hamas movement amid frequent violence along the Israel-Gaza border, where Palestinians have been holding weekly protests.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been suspended since 2014 and efforts to revive them have not been successful.
Netanyahu and al-Sisi convened for their previously announced talks several hours after US President Donald Trump said he wanted a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in what had appeared to be the clearest expression yet of his administration’s support for such an outcome.
However, later on Wednesday, Trump told a news conference he would be open to a one-state solution if that was the preference of the parties themselves, a position he had previously stated.
Netanyahu, a right-wing politician who rarely utters publicly the words “Palestinian state” — a concept he conditionally endorsed in 2009, but which far-right coalition partners oppose — said he was not taken by surprise by Trump’s initial remarks.
In a statement, Netanyahu said he was confident a promised US peace plan would back Israel’s demand to maintain security control of the West Bank, territory it occupied in a 1967 war and which Palestinians seek as part of a future state.
Palestinians are boycotting Washington’s peace efforts after Trump broke with long-standing US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy to the city.
Netanyahu and al-Sisi met in public for the first time last year.
Israeli media reports last month said they had held a secret summit in Egypt in May to discuss a truce in Gaza, which is under tight Israeli and Egyptian border restrictions.
Egypt was the first of a handful of Arab countries to recognize Israel under a 1979 peace treaty and the two maintain close coordination on security and energy ties.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion