Qatar accuses Israel of playing for time on the Gaza plan

Qatar says Israel is "playing for time" in the negotiating process for Gaza by rejecting the roadmap drawn up by the Board of Peace. According to Doha this is how Israel behaved throughout the war in the Strip.

The statement came from Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson for the Qatari foreign ministry, who asked the international community to apply pressure so that the second phase of the United States-backed twenty-point plan for Gaza is implemented. Hamas has accepted that plan, al-Ansari said, and the responsibility to move forward now falls on Israel. The remarks are reported by the Times of Israel.

The spokesperson also indicated that eight countries will announce concrete steps to advance the plan: alongside Qatar these are Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Neither their content nor their timing was specified.

The second phase is the hardest part of any negotiating framework on Gaza, because it concerns the arrangement after the ceasefire: who administers the territory, with which security forces and on what timetable. It is the point at which formulas agreed on paper have to turn into verifiable decisions, and where the various plans have so far stalled.

The Iranian file

In the same statement al-Ansari touched on the ongoing talks between the United States and Iran. Qatar's priority, he explained, is to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and to restore the situation as it stood before the war.

On this point Doha sets a condition of method. Any future agreement on the strait, the spokesperson said, should rest on "regional consensus and full respect for international law". The formula implicitly rules out understandings negotiated between Washington and Tehran alone, without the coastal states that depend on the strait for their exports.

From Israel there has so far been no public reply to the Qatari claims.