Brussels, 27/07/2011 (Agence Europe) - France has repeated its willingness to organise a conference of donor countries for Palestine this autumn. “The financial situation of the Palestinians is giving us cause for concern. That is why we have made our proposal” that a donors' conference be held, said a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry on Tuesday 26 July. Salam Fayyad, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, sounded the alarm in Ramallah on Tuesday. “The Palestinian Authority may not be able to pay employees their salaries for the next two months”, he warned.
The conference, if it is decided it will be held, will take place against a very specific background, where threats hang over the peace process in the expectation of the UN General Assembly being called on formally to recognise a new independent Palestinian state. “There will be no solution to the conflict in the Middle East without recognition of two states for two peoples: the nation state of Israel for the Jewish people and the nation state of Palestine for the Palestinian people”, the French spokesman said. “What is important to us at the moment is the resumption of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The status quo is untenable and we want to avoid a jumbling of diplomatic issues at the United Nations General Assembly in September. Negotiations have to be resumed, based on balance parameters”.
In the course of preliminary debates before the UN's September meeting, which took place in the Security Council in New York on 26 July, Pedro Serrano, acting EU Head of Delegation called for Israel and the Palestinians to resume direct negotiations on agreements on the borders of the two states, mutual security arrangements, a fair solution to the refugee issue and the final status of Jerusalem, a UN press release reports. (F.B./transl.rt)