The Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations in New York, Moataz Ahmadein Khalil, read on Tuesday, Egypt’s statement before the Security Council during the monthly briefing on the situation in the Middle East, in which he emphasized Egypt's support for the current negotiations between Palestine and the Israeli government in order to reach a final peace agreement.
The statement expressed Egypt’s concern on the existence of substantial differences, which are difficult to overcome, between the two parties.
Khalil called on the Israeli government, as the occupying power, to take the necessary steps to achieve the two-state solution before it is too late, pointing to recent statistics which showed that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has doubled three times since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and until 2012, threatening the two-state solution and spoiling opportunities for peace.
A diplomatic source at Egyptian Foreign Ministry that the statement also argued that Egypt has declined to exploit the serious situation in Syria in order to turn a blind eye on the continued Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
It however welcomed the agreement on the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons as a further step towards freeing the region from all types of weapons of mass destruction, as well as previous steps which have not been fully implemented, such as Security Council resolution 687, whose implementation was confined on the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, without continuing on the steps resolution aiming to empty the entire Middle East of all these weapons.
Edited translation from al-Masry al-Youm
