- Photo: Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP file
DAVOS, (Switzerland): United Nations chief Antonio Guterres (pic) on Wednesday (Jan 22) hailed Donald Trump's diplomatic efforts to help secure a truce in the Gaza Strip following 15 months of war.
"I will praise the United States, Qatar and Turkey for their efforts for months and months and months to obtain the release of hostages, also to obtain the ceasefire," Guterres said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"There was a large contribution of the robust diplomacy of the at-the-time president-elect of the United States," he added.
"I feel that when we had the position of Israel still reluctant to the ceasefire just two days before it happened, and then all of a sudden there was an acceptance," he added.
Trump had warned there would be "hell to pay" if there was no agreement to release hostages held by Hamas.
The ceasefire has held since going into effect on Sunday, although Trump said at the start of the week that he was not confident it would hold.
In its first phase, the deal calls for the release of 33 hostages seized during the Palestinian militant group's attack on southern Israel on October 7.
But Guterres said it was not clear yet what the future relationship would look like between Israelis and Palestinians.
"One possibility is to move into annexation of the West Bank, probably a kind of a limbo situation in Gaza, which of course is against its national law and would mean there will never be peace in the Middle East," he warned.
Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler in the Palestinian territory, said recently that 2025 would be "the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria", referring to the biblical name that Israel uses for the West Bank.
During his first term in the White House, Trump put forward a peace plan in 2020 that would have included major Israeli annexations in the West Bank. - AFP
