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.
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