Gaza City: The international community should not wait for progress on the diplomatic front before providing much needed assistance to the Gaza Strip, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Monday as he toured the Palestinian enclave.
Speaking almost a year after the 50-day war between the Israeli regime and Palestinian armed groups, he called the situation facing the enclave’s 1.8 million residents “catastrophic.”
“We cannot wait to improve living conditions until talks about a two-state solution are back on track,” said Steinmeier, who visited a United Nations girls school built with German support.
Despite international pledges of more than $5 billion (Dh18.35 billion), little has been achieved in the enclave’s reconstruction.
During talks held in occupied Jerusalem and Ramallah on Sunday, the German foreign minister had called for a relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, stressing however that such negotiations “shouldn’t last forever.”
A Hamas source, meanwhile, denied rumours that the German minister’s arrival was related to covert talks on a prisoner exchange deal between the Israelis and Hamas.
Unauthorised interview
Abdullah Barghouti, an explosives engineer connected to Hamas, had earlier given an unauthorised interview from an Israeli jail to a Gaza radio station urging the organisation’s military wing not to sign a new prisoner exchange deal with Israel.
In 2011, Germany helped broker a prisoners swap that saw Hamas free Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage in Gaza for over five years, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian militants jailed in Israel.
Steinmeier was scheduled to fly to Paris later on Monday for a meeting of foreign ministers on the war against Daesh.
