“Prolonged conflicts in the Middle East have an impact on regional and global peace and stability. The UNSC must be able to produce real progress in resolving the Middle East issue, especially Palestine,” said Retno in the regular UNSC briefing at the United Nations headquarters in New York, as quoted from a press statement.

As president at the UNSC for the whole month of May, Indonesia chaired Wednesday’s meeting, which was attended by representatives from 14 other UNSC member states.

Retno said that, since a similar UNSC briefing in January, the situation in the Middle East had worsened, particularly in Palestine, as well as Gaza — where clashes between Israel and Palestine escalated in early May.

Retno also cited Israel’s recent decision to end the UN mandated Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), which has served as a mechanism to protect Palestinian civilians, and the illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine.

She later called on the UNSC member states to further provide protection for Palestinian civilians, highlighting the importance of restarting the peace process between Palestine and Israel following a series of agreement breaches by Israel and its ally, the United States.

In the past two years, the US, under President Donald Trump’s administration, has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy to the city. The US has recently also recognized Golan Heights — a territory annexed from Syria during the 1967 War — as Israeli territory.

Washington has also decided to cut its budget for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and closed the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Washington office, which had served as the Palestinian embassy in the US.

Washington has recently been boasting about its peace plan for the Israel-Palestine conflict, which was already rejected by Palestine due to concerns that the plan was not intended to reach peace, but rather set out conditions for surrender.

“A new perspective in the peace process does not mean ignoring prevailing international parameters. For Indonesia, there are no other alternatives besides the ‘two-state solution’,” said Retno.

The Wednesday briefing also presented UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov and UNRWA commissioner-general Pierre Krähenbühl — both gave UNSC the latest information on the situation in the Middle East, including in Gaza, via a video conference.

Mladenov said the UN had been intensively working with Egypt and many other stakeholders to calm the situation in Gaza “but Israeli and Palestinian lives were — tragically — lost”.

“While the situation has now stabilized, it remains very tense. One thing is clear, these dangerous cycles of escalation and de-escalation are not sustainable in the future,” he said as quoted from UN website.

He argued that sustainable peace could only be achieved by, among other things, progressing on “resolving the Palestinian divide” and on “charting a course towards the two-state solution based on long-standing international parameters, including relevant UN resolutions and previous agreements”.

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