At Doha summit, Aoun urges Arabs to press Israel to accept just peace

President Joseph Aoun on Monday announced that “the picture after the (Israeli) aggression against Doha has become clear and the response to it must be equally clear.”

“We did not come here to express our solidarity with a sisterly country. We are here, in the name of Lebanon, all of Lebanon, to express our true and profound solidarity with ourselves,” Aoun said at an emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha responding to Israel’s latest attack on Hamas officials in Qatar.

He added: "The real target of the recent aggression against beloved Doha was not a group of individuals, but rather the concept of mediation and the principle of solutions through dialogue. The goal of the attack was not to assassinate negotiators, but rather to eliminate the very idea of negotiation.”

He continued: "We all know that we experience signs of this behavior every day, with the shelling of hungry children in Gaza, the bombing of defenseless civilians in Syria, and the targeting of innocents in Lebanon. But the message conveyed through the attack on Qatar was clearer and more blatant.”

“In a few days, we will go to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the entire world seeking peace will meet. Let us go there with a unified position, embodied by one question: Does the government of Israel want a just and lasting peace in our region? If the answer is yes, then we are ready in accordance with the Arab Peace Initiative proposed by the sisterly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the Beirut Summit in 2002 and unanimously adopted by our Arab League,” Aoun added.

“Let us sit immediately under the auspices of the United Nations and all those seeking peace, to discuss the requirements of that answer. If the answer is no, or half an answer or no answer, we will also be satisfied. Then we will realize the reality of the situation and act accordingly, so that we may at least stop the chain of disappointments," the president went on to say.