By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO (Reuters) – Israel’s plans to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza would amount to illegal forceful displacement, would lead to more violence and would undermine efforts to create a Palestinian state, the foreign ministers of Norway and Iceland said on Thursday.
The pair are part of a group of Western European nations – which also includes Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and Luxembourg – which on Wednesday condemned Israel’s plans to step up its military operations in Gaza as it seeks to remove militant group Hamas.
Israel’s Security Cabinet this week approved a plan that may include the seizure of the entire enclave of 2.3 million people, as well as control over aid, which it has blocked from entering since March.
“We are alarmed and appalled by what we have heard from the Israeli security cabinet about plans to step up even stronger the military campaign in Gaza and to do what they refer to as an evacuation,” Norway’s Espen Barth Eide said in an interview.
“It will amount to forceful displacement of the Palestinian people, first from north to south, and potentially out of the country. This is clearly illegal in international law,” he said, adding “it will undermine the hope for a Palestinian state … (and be) a recipe for more bloodshed.”
The foreign minister of Iceland, the first Western European nation to recognise Palestine as a state in 2011, said Israel must let humanitarian aid in to help civilians.
“What is needed more urgently than ever is a resumption of a ceasefire and the unconditional release of all hostages,” Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir said in the joint phone interview.
The U.S. and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza, Reuters reported on Wednesday, with sources citing the U.S. administration of Iraq after the 2003 war as a possible model.
Norway, which served as a facilitator in the 1992-1993 talks between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993, has more recently been supporting Arab efforts for a post-war plan for Gaza.
Barth Eide said Palestinian governance in Gaza was needed, not Hamas-run, but “a Palestinian governance that will be in charge of both Gaza and the West Bank”.
“The authority that they (the U.S.) set up in Iraq after the Iraq war, to put it very carefully, is not universally recognized as a very good idea,” he said. “That was not successful.”
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
