Check against delivery!  

Thank you, Prime Minister [of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammad Shtayyeh]. Thank you very much for this meeting. 

I am very glad to be here in Ramallah and talk to you, and to President [Mahmoud] Abbas and to your Foreign Minister [Riyad Al] Maliki. But I would have liked to do that in different circumstances, in another moment, because [right now] we are witnessing a tragedy. 

The European Union is a friend of the Palestinian people and when I am saying a tragedy, I am making a reference to what is happening in Gaza, to what has happened in Israel, and what is happening with the situation in the West Bank.

In Gaza, there are already thousands of civilian victims, about half of them are children. There is a severe shortage of food, water, electricity, fuel - everything. Yesterday, I was briefed by the United Nations’ organisation working [on the ground]. The situation is critical from the point of view of the working of hospitals, with the collapse of the health systems and a grave lack of medicines and medical supplies.

We can say that the 7^th of October - the terrorist attack of the 7^th of October - changed the paradigm of an already fragile situation.

On the 7^th of October, following the Hamas attack, I said that Hamas has harmed the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. 

Nothing can justify what Hamas did to the people they attacked with brutality and taking hostages, women, children and elderly people, and provoking such an intense Israeli response. 

Every civilian life is deplorable when it is lost. We condemned Hamas for its terrorist attacks in the strongest terms. We urged them to free the hostages and to give immediate access to them to the Red Cross or Red Crescent. I met with several of their relatives, who described the difficult health conditions of many of them. 

But the European Union has also firmly stressed that the way that Israel performs its right to defend [itself] matters. That Israel needs to respect international humanitarian law and the principle of proportionality. I passed this message yesterday, face-to-face, in very clear terms, to the Israeli authorities with which I met.

A horror does not justify another horror. The best friends of Israel are the ones that ask them not to be driven by rage.

The European Union - and now also the United Nations through the last United Nations Security Council resolution adopted [day before] yesterday - has demanded immediate humanitarian pauses and more access for humanitarian assistance, including water and fuel, [so] that [it] can reach the civilians in Gaza.

We, at the European Union, since the start of the Israeli military campaign against Hamas, we have multiplied by four our humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza to almost €100 million and have increased our funding for UNRWA by another €10 million, bringing the funding [to] over €90 million this year. But we know it is not enough. 

We know that humanitarian needs are immense and [that] to provide everything that more than two million people need, is a gigantic effort. And the international community should be able to provide this assistance. 

Mr Prime Minister, 

The war against Hamas in Gaza is the outcome of a collective political and moral failure of the international community. A great political and moral failure for which the Israeli and the Palestinian people are paying a high price.

Only a political solution can end this untenable cycle of violence. Only a political solution can stop it. That is why I am on this tour, starting with Israel [and] followed by Ramallah to visit you, the Palestinian Authority, in order to work with our partners on a way forward and look at what should [be] done for this war to end and how to create a better future based on peace. 

Allow me to put on the table some ideas for the work that we have done because this dramatic event, at least, has taken the Palestinian issue out of the limbo. Nobody was taking seriously this problem and now there is no other solution than to take it very much seriously.

And this mental framework, in which I think we have to work, I can summarise it in three “yes’s” and three “no’s”. 

The first “no” is: No to forced displacements of Palestinians in and from Gaza. No forced displacement of Palestinian people out of Gaza. 

No territorial changes. No to the reoccupation by Israel or a safe haven for Hamas in Gaza.

No to the dissociation of Gaza from the overall Palestinian issue. The solution in Gaza has to be embedded as part of the solution to the whole Palestinian problem. So, no dissociation of Gaza from the overall Palestinian issue. 

And now with the “yes’s”. 

The first “yes” is the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. I am saying “the” Palestinian Authority – you. You are already there. You never left Gaza. You have been providing public services to the population, with our support. You have the capacity to continue doing this job. Maybe you will need support from the international community, but the Palestinian Authority has to return to Gaza. 

The second “yes” that we need is a stronger involvement of the Arab countries. 

And the third one is the greater involvement of the European Union, in particular on the political process, in building the Palestinian state. 

We have a certain experience on State building in Europe and we should engage on that in order to build the Palestinian State as a part of a two-state solution.

But we should not forget the situation in the West Bank. You know [it] better than I. I discussed also with my Israeli counterpart [Eli Cohen] yesterday, and everybody should be aware that there is an upsurge of settler terrorism since October 7. Since the beginning of the year, 421 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Since the first days of October - since this dramatic 7^th of October it is 202. It means that since this dramatic event has started, the same number of Palestinians has been killed in the West Bank than from the beginning of the year until October. This has increased the numbers of communities being forced out of their homes.

Today, there are more than 150 illegal outposts, whose main purpose is to serve as staging basis for the settlers.

We have urged Israeli authorities to address this issue at the highest level to prevent an eruption of violence in the West Bank.

Our support to the Palestinian Authority, as the only representative of the Palestinian people, is both political and financial. We are the biggest international donor for the Palestinian people - and we will continue being the biggest financial contribution to the Palestinian Authority’s working.

Because this war has shown us that we cannot [leave] the Palestinian issue unresolved. However tragic it is now – and it is very tragic - we must seize this momentum to invest in peace and to work towards a solution of the conflict.

We have to mobilise the international support for the political process towards a two-state solution - a process that has been neglected for too long. 

The two-state solution is the only viable path to peace. Time has come to define the concrete steps to take in order to implement it. Because we have been repeating for years – 30 years since the Oslo agreements – “two-states solution”, without doing what is needed to implement that in practice.

This is, Prime Minister, my message here in Ramallah. This is what I said yesterday in Israel. I am saying the same thing, in both places. This is the message I am carrying to my next destinations, in Manama, in Riyad, in Doha and in Amman. 

Prime Minister, in September – remember - in New York, we launched the Peace Day Effort to support re-starting of the peace process. At that moment, there was a lot of scepticism, and nobody was taking care of this effort, apart from you, me and some of my people working with a vision about the need to deal with this problem. 

Today, the current tragedy only forces us to redouble this effort – for the benefit of the Palestinian people so that they can finally live in freedom, peace and prosperity, and dignity side-by-side with the Israeli people, living in peace and security. 

That is what we want to do. Count on the European Union as a predictable and reliable partner that remains and will continue [to be] with the Palestinian people in order to get this solved - [as] difficult [as] it could be, more difficult today than yesterday.

At least, today it is in the front page of the newspapers around the world. This is a momentum in which the conscience of the international community has to mobilise in order to avoid a greater disaster. Because if there is no peace here in the Middle East, we will not be secure at home either. 

Thank you. 

• Link to the video: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-249418