Egypt urges Israel to revive peace talks with Palestinians

CAIRO – Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry held on Sunday (Sept. 19) a phone conversation with his Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid, and urged Israel to revive peace talks with the Palestinian side to end their decades-long conflict, said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

Shoukry stressed the necessity of creating a political horizon for resuming the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations “in a manner that consolidates the pillars of stability in the region and spares it waves of escalation and tension,” Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez said in the statement.

Shoukry-Lapid phone talks also addressed the efforts made in coordination with the Palestinian Authority for the reconstruction and development of occupied Palestinian territories, according to the statement.

The talks came a few days after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in Egypt’s Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh and discussed the developments of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Egypt, which signed a U.S.-sponsored peace treaty with Israel in 1979, has always been supporting the right of the Palestinians to establish their own independent state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, based on the UN-proposed two-state solution. (Xinhua)