A new international push for Middle East peace is needed following a year in which the process has lost ground by every measure, a top UN official said on Tuesday.
The month-long war between Israel and Hizbollah and continued fighting between Israelis and Palestinians have driven home that the peace process is stalled, a situation that "should therefore be regarded as unacceptable," Ibrahim Gambari, who heads the UN Department of Political Affairs, told the Security Council.
A comprehensive new effort should aim "to bring peace and stability to the region as a whole" and should be "sanctioned and championed" by the 15-nation council, he said.
His plea reflected earlier remarks by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who told the council on August 11 to focus on a political solution to "all the separate but intertwined issues and conflicts in the region" and not just Lebanon and Israel.
It also reflected recent statements by the Arab League, which in July pronounced the Middle East peace process dead and called on the Security Council to revive it.
Arab League foreign ministers have announced plans to send a mission to New York in September to put their case for a fresh start to the peace process.
Gambari said the tragedy of the war between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah should be transformed into "an opportunity to take prompt, concerted action by all parties and to resolve the problems and issues in the region, which have confronted us, without resolution, for far too long."
Focusing primarily on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which was knocked out of the headlines by the fighting along the Israeli-Lebanese border, he ticked off a long list of developments over the past year that had led to a "woeful decline" in confidence in the peace process.
He said he feared this trend may have been strengthened by the war between Hizbollah and Israel and could well fuel support for "violence and terror" on the Palestinian side and for "harsh and excessive military actions and unilateral measures" on the Israeli side. "Positions may be hardening, and could harden further, unless a credible political process is somehow revived," Gambari warned.