Turkiye FM calls for regional cooperation to fight PKK

DOHA: Qatar reaffirmed its support for a two-state solution on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump repeated his call to move Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt or Jordan.
Foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari did not reveal details of conversations with US officials, but said Qatar often didn’t see “eye to eye” with its allies.
“Our position has always been clear to the necessity of the Palestinian people receiving their rights, and that the two-state solution is the only path forward,” Ansari told a regular media briefing when asked about Trump’s comments.
“We don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things with all our allies, not only the United States, but we work very closely with them to make sure that we formulate policy together,” he added.
Qatar, the US and Egypt jointly mediated the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal that went into effect a little over a week ago, halting more than 15 months of fighting sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
On Monday, Trump repeated his wish to move Gazans to another country, after earlier saying he wanted to “clean out” the devastated Palestinian territory.
The US president told reporters he would “like to get them living in an area where they can live without disruption and revolution and violence so much.”
Ansari said Qatar, which hosts the region’s biggest US military base, was “engaging fully with the Trump administration and with envoy (Steve) Witkoff,” the president’s special representative for the Middle East.
“I’m not going to comment on the type of discussions we are having with them right now, but I would say that it is very productive,” Ansari said.
“We have been working very closely with the Trump administration over the regional issues as a whole, including the Palestinian issue.”

LONDON: Israel and the US would be “crazy” to strike Iran’s nuclear program, the latter’s foreign minister has said.

“We’ve made it clear that any attack to our nuclear facilities would be faced with an immediate and decisive response,” Abbas Araghchi told Sky News in his first interview since the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.

“I don’t think they’ll do that crazy thing. This is really crazy. And this would turn the whole region into a very bad disaster.”

In the interview, Araghchi addressed concerns over his country’s nuclear program. Trump’s first term as president saw the US pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, which had eased sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limited uranium enrichment.

Iran claims that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, but its return to high levels of enrichment in recent years has alarmed Western governments.

Trump has said he prefers a diplomatic solution, and a new deal with Iran would be “nice.” But Araghchi said credible US guarantees would need to be provided to Iran for negotiations to begin.

“The situation is different and much more difficult than the previous time,” he added. “Lots of things should be done by the other side to buy our confidence … We haven’t heard anything but the ‘nice’ word, and this is obviously not enough.”