Israel condemns France’s decision to recognise Palestinian state

Israel has strongly criticised French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to recognise Palestine, warning it could empower terrorism. France becomes the most influential European nation to take this diplomatic step amid global tensions.

Jerusalem: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

The French President wrote on the social media platform X earlier on Thursday night, “Consistent with its historic commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, I have decided that France will recognise the State of Palestine.”

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Macron added that he will make this “solemn announcement” before the upcoming 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Xinhua news agency reported.

In a statement from his office, Netanyahu on Thursday night said, “Such a move rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy, just as Gaza became.”

“A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launch pad to annihilate Israel, not to live in peace beside it,” he added.

In a statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said, “A Palestinian state will be a Hamas state, just as the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip twenty years ago led to Hamas taking control of it.”

Macron’s move follows his earlier declaration in April, stating that France would recognise the Palestinian state during an international conference on Palestine, co-chaired with Saudi Arabia in New York in June.

But under pressure from the US, the international conference has been postponed until the end of July.

The move makes France the largest and arguably most influential country in Europe to move to recognise a Palestinian state, after European Union members Norway, Ireland and Spain indicated they would also begin the same process.

At least 142 countries out of the 193 members of the UN currently recognise or plan to recognise a Palestinian state, but several powerful Western countries have refused to do so. They include the US, the UK and Germany.

The announcement comes as European anger over Israel’s war on Gaza — in which Israel has killed 59,587 Palestinians and imposed severe restrictions on aid deliveries that have led to a hunger crisis — has grown.

Earlier this week, France joined the UK, Australia, Canada and 21 other allies of Israel in condemning restrictions on aid shipments into Gaza, as well as the killings of hundreds of Palestinians trying to reach food.

The joint statement, the most significant yet from Western countries, said the war “must end now”.

Macron had previously indicated his “determination to recognise the state of Palestine”, and France’s Foreign Minister is set to co-host a conference at the UN next week on a two-state solution to the decades-long conflict.

The UK government has also said that Prime Minister Keir Starmer intends to coordinate with allies France and Germany in an urgent phone call regarding the situation in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

Starmer said that a ceasefire in Gaza will “put us on a path to the recognition of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution, which guarantees peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis”.

Dozens of countries, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, followed within a week, in a list that has grown steadily since Israel launched its war in Gaza following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

But major barriers remain to the creation of a future Palestinian state.

Israel currently occupies the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, long considered the capital of the future Palestinian state.

The Israeli government has overseen a major expansion of Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, across the occupied West Bank, in what rights observers have described as effective annexation.

Earlier this week, Israel’s Parliament approved a symbolic measure explicitly calling for the annexation of the territory, which it initially seized in the 1967 war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Macron’s announcement.

“Such a move rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy, just as Gaza became,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

“A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launchpad to annihilate Israel,” the statement said.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz called the move “a disgrace and a surrender to terrorism”.

“We will not allow the establishment of a Palestinian entity that would harm our security, endanger our existence, and undermine our historical right to the Land of Israel,” he said.