Oslo Accords 25 years on: false hope, broken promises

Thursday marks 25 years since the first Oslo Accords were signed. 

The agreement was considered the cornerstone of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. 

It was signed in 1993 in Washington DC by the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat. 

They laid out a five-year timetable for resolving areas of conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis and also create two states, side-by-side.

In the accords, Israel was formally recognised as a state, but there was no official recognition of a Palestinian state. 

The agreement only recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.

And there was no agreement to freeze the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Since the signing, according to EU statistics, the number of Israeli settlers has increased from about 100,000 to more than 600,000. 

Most countries view those settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.

TRT World's Caitlin McGee has more from East Jerusalem..

“I believe now that Oslo is dead,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was among the tiny circle of Palestinian politicians entrusted by Arafat with the secret that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had begun meeting in Norway in 1992.

Now 73, Abed Rabbo concedes his side made mistakes. Now, few even talk of a peace process. 

Last month, support for a two-state solution fell to 43 percent among Israeli Jews and Palestinians in one opinion poll, the weakest in almost two decades of joint Palestinian-Israeli survey research.

“We should not mourn a ghost," Abed Rabbo said. "We should have a new strategy - not to abandon the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, not to abandon the right to build our own independent state, but to try to find ways and means to reach that goal different from the ways and means that we have used in the past.”

Failure of peace talks

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. US President Donald Trump has pledged a "deal of the century" to end the decades-old conflict.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that any future Palestinian state must be demilitarised and must recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people - conditions that Palestinians say show he is not sincere about peacemaking.

And Palestinians fumed when Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December and moved the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv in May.

Both steps and led the Palestinian leadership to boycott Washington's peace efforts spearheaded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law.

Further moves saw the Trump administration withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the UN refugee agency dealing with Palestinians and to hospitals in East Jerusalem, and the order to close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, which opened in 1994.

In Gaza, ruled by Hamas since 2007, two years after Israeli soldiers and settlers withdrew, one of the group's senior leaders, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, said the Oslo deal was not a peace pact but "100 percent surrender" for the Palestinians.