ANKARA 

Algeria has called for holding an international peace conference under the auspices of the United Nations to end the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. 

“What’s happening in Gaza today brings back to the forefront more than ever the need to speed up efforts to address the essence of the conflict by renewing and activating our collective commitment to the two-state solution for a just, lasting, and final solution,” Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf told a meeting of the UN Security Council member-states in New York.

He called on the UN “to firmly respond” to Israeli voices rejecting the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he told the US that he opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of any post-war scenario.

The Israeli prime minister pledged to continue a military campaign in the Gaza Strip until Israel achieves a decisive victory against Hamas, something many analysts have said is “impossible.”

US-sponsored peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel collapsed in 2014 over Tel Aviv’s ongoing settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

Attaf renewed calls for Palestine’s full membership in the UN “as an urgent measure to preserve the basic foundations of the two-state solution, and an inevitable step to preserve the legal components of the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Israel has launched a deadly offensive on the Gaza Strip following an Oct. 7 Hamas attack, killing at least 25,700 Palestinians and injuring 63,740 others. Nearly 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack.

The Israeli war has left 85% of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while more than half of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

*Writing by Mohammad Sio