French President Emmanuel Macron met with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas in Paris on Tuesday to discuss the “full implementation” of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire agreement. They announced a joint French-Palestinian committee to draw up a Palestinian constitution.
French President Emmanuel Macron met with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Paris on Tuesday to discuss the “full implementation” of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
After the meeting, Macron announced that France would launch a joint committee with the Palestinian Authority to draw up a new Palestinian constitution.
“We decided together to establish a joint committee for the consolidation of the state of Palestine,” Macron said, adding that it would “contribute to drawing up a new constitution, a draft of which President Abbas presented to me”.
Abbas said he agreed “to the swift establishment of the constitutional committee”.
Their meeting comes a month into a fragile truce between Hamas and Israel, following two years of war triggered by the Palestinian militant group’s October 7, 2023 attack against Israel.
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Abbas, 89, is the long-time head of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control over parts of the West Bank and is being considered to assume governance in Gaza under the deal.
The two leaders also discussed Israeli plans for annexation in the West Bank, which Macron described as a “red line”.
“Plans for partial or total annexation, whether legal or de facto, constitute a red line to which we will respond strongly with our European partners,” the French president said.
“The violence of the settlers and the acceleration of settlement projects are reaching new heights, threatening the stability of the West Bank and constitute violations of international law,” Macron added.
Brokered by US President Donald Trump, the October 10 ceasefire has been tested by fresh Israeli strikes and claims of Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers.
Trump said last week he expected an International Stabilisation Force tasked with monitoring the ceasefire to be in Gaza “very soon”.
The meeting also followed Macron’s decision in September to recognise a Palestinian state at a United Nations summit – a move the Palestinian Authority hailed as “historic and courageous”.
Under the first stage of the plan, which took effect on October 10, the Israeli military currently controls 53 percent of the Mediterranean territory, including much of its farmland, along with Rafah in the south, parts of Gaza City and other urban areas.
Nearly all Gaza’s 2 million people are crammed into tent camps and the rubble of shattered cities across the rest of Gaza, which is under Hamas control.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The Israeli military’s retaliatory campaign has since killed more than 69,000 Palestinians, also mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations, does not specify the number of fighters killed within this total, though it has said that the majority of them are women and children.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
