Sheikh Mohammed says Palestinians in Gaza – and not any other country – should dictate the way the enclave is governed.

Qatar’s prime minister has said he hopes the Palestinian Authority (PA) will return to play a governing role in Gaza when Israel’s war ends.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023 after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel that killed at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli figures.

Israel’s ferocious 15-month assault on Gaza has killed more than 47,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities, and destroyed much of the territory’s civilian infrastructure. Israel has severely restricted supplies of aid to the territory, leading to warnings of a humanitarian crisis.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani was speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, two days after the ceasefire that Qatar helped broker came into effect in Gaza.

The prime minister cautioned that Palestinians in Gaza – and not any other country – should dictate the way the enclave will be governed.

“We hope to see the PA back in Gaza. We hope to see a government that will really address the issues of the people over there. And there is a long way to go with Gaza and the destruction,” he said.

‘Time wasted’

Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Qatar’s foreign minister, said that his country was sorry for the time wasted in the talks between Israel and Hamas.

“When we look at and reflect on what we have achieved in the last few days, we felt really sorry for all the time … wasted in these negotiations,” he said.

“We have seen that the framework that we have agreed on in December is the one that’s been realised a couple of days ago, and … I’m talking about December ’23, this means just a year of negotiating details” the prime minister said.

He added that this included “some meaningless things compared to the lives of the people that they have lost”.

How Gaza will be governed after the war was not directly addressed in the agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that ran Gaza until the war.

The ceasefire agreement between the sides was mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States and includes a truce, the exchange of Israeli captives for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, and a surge in humanitarian aid deliveries.

Israel has rejected any governing role for Hamas, but it has also opposed rule by the Palestinian Authority, the body set up under the Oslo interim peace accords three decades ago that has limited governing power in parts of the occupied West Bank.

The PA, dominated by the Fatah faction created by former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, faces opposition from rival faction Hamas, which prevailed in elections and then drove the PA out of Gaza in 2007 after a brief war.