Qatar Rules Out Establishing Ties With Israel — Official Says


Qatar won’t join Gulf Arab neighbors in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel until its conflict with the Palestinians is resolved, the Qatari assistant foreign minister said.

Lolwah Alkhater also suggested in an interview Monday that there may soon be progress toward ending a three-year-old boycott of her country by regional states.

Alkhater spoke to Bloomberg a day before Israel and the United Arab Emirates are to sign the first treaty between a Gulf Arab nation and the majority-Jewish state. On Friday, Bahrain announced that it, too, would normalize relations with Israel, to the dismay of the Palestinians, who see the alliances with Israel as a betrayal of their statehood cause.

“We don’t think that normalization was the core of this conflict and hence it can’t be the answer,” Alkhater said. “The core of this conflict is about the drastic conditions that the Palestinians are living under” as “people without a country, living under occupation.”

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