UN chief Antonio Guterres has hailed Donald Trump's diplomatic efforts that helped bring about a ceasefire in Gaza after 15 months of war.
"I commend the United States, Qatar and Turkey for their efforts over months and months and months to achieve the release of the hostages, also to achieve a ceasefire," Guterres stated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"The decisive diplomacy of the newly elected US president at the time was also a big contribution," he said, as quoted by AFP.
"I feel that when we had the position of Israel, which still did not agree with the ceasefire just two days before it happened, and then suddenly there was acceptance," Guterres added.
Trump had warned there would be "serious consequences" if there was no agreement to release the hostages held by Hamas.
The ceasefire has held since it went into effect on January 19, although Trump said earlier this week that he was not sure it would hold.
In its first phase, the agreement provides for the release of 33 hostages taken during the Palestinian militant group's attack on southern Israel on 7 October.
But Guterres said it was not yet clear what future relations between Israelis and Palestinians would look like.
"One possibility is to move towards annexation of the West Bank, probably towards a kind of a quiescence situation in Gaza, which of course goes against its national law and would mean that 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 territories, said recently that 2025 would be "the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria," referring to the biblical name Israel uses for the West Bank.
During his first term in the White House, Trump presented a peace plan in 2020 that would have included major Israeli annexations of the West Bank. | BGNES
