President Emmanuel Macron says France could recognise a Palestinian state “in the coming months”. Macron told France 5 television on Wednesday that he aimed to finalise the move at a United Nations conference on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which his country will co-chair with Saudi Arabia in June.
“We must move towards recognition, and we will do so in the coming months,” Macron said. “I’m not doing it to please anyone. I’ll do it because at some point it will be right,”
Palestine’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, told the news agency AFP that France’s recognition would be “a step in the right direction in line with safeguarding the rights of the Palestinian people and the two-state solution”.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said any “unilateral recognition” of a Palestinian state would be a “boost for Hamas”. “A ‘unilateral recognition’ of a fictional Palestinian state, by any country, in the reality that we all know, will be a prize for terror and a boost for Hamas,” he wrote on X.
“These kind of actions will not bring peace, security and stability in our region closer – but the opposite: they only push them further away,” he said.
Palestine has been recognised as a sovereign state by 147 out of 193 UN members so far, with Armenia, Slovenia, Ireland, Norway, Spain, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados joining their ranks last year.
However, despite growing international support for Palestinian statehood, several major Western countries like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany have withheld recognition.
Source: Aljazeera
