![Norway's Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide speaks during a press conference following a meeting of foreign ministers from 14 countries from the Middle East, the Nordics and the Benelux on the situation in the Gaza Strip, on December 15, 2023 in Oslo, Norway. [STIAN LYSBERG SOLUM/NTB/AFP via Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/GettyImages-1850242317.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
A number of European states, Arab countries and the United States are working on a concept for a unified Palestinian government that could attract reconstruction funds, Norway’s foreign minister said in an interview in Davos, according to Reuters.
“A number of countries are working with us… trying to build a broad unity government,” Espen Barth Eide said, without naming the states.
Norway believes a unified Palestinian territory should be run by the Palestinian Authority, but “prefacing everything, it has to be what the Palestinians want,” he added.
Norway served as a facilitator in the 1992-1993 talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993.
“What we can do is work on Palestinian unity, and think about models with interested countries,” he said.
He stressed that “the expansion of the war to other fronts in the Middle East demonstrates the urgent need to strengthen the solution based on the two-state principle.”
Calls for a two-state solution have grown in the wake of Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza since 7 October in which more than 24,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children.
Read: Blinken says Arab countries not keen to rebuild Gaza if it will be ‘levelled’ again