(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) Palestinians and Israelis must return to the negotiating table, because without a peaceful solution, militant groups will continue to have reasons to recruit young people, said US Secretary of State John Kerry.
"As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we - there wasn't a leader I met with in the region who didn't raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt ... they had to respond to," Kerry said at a reception hosted the Department of State, late on Thursday.
The ISIL is acronym of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, referred by the Arab media as "Daesh." The movement has recently seized control of large swaths of lands in Syria and Iraq, prompting Western powers to form a coalition to contain, or annihilate, it.
"People need to understand the connection of that," he added. "And it has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity," said Kerry, who had been on a shuttle mission in the Middle East to drum up support against the ISIL, among other tasks.
"I was just in Cairo, as you know, where a terrific USD 5.4 billion was raised in order to help rebuild Gaza, and we could not have emphasized more times how critical it is not to rebuild it so it is destroyed again," he continu
ed. "It is imperative that we find a way to get back to the negotiations for what everybody knows is, in the end, the only way to go forward that makes sense." "The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions," he acknowledged. Kerry touched on plight of Syrian refugees pouring neighboring countries, saying, "We now have 10 million people or so displaced - a million and a half in Lebanon, a million and a half in Turkey, a million and a half-plus or more in Jordan - and internally, huge population displaced," he said.
On the issue of climate change, he pointed to the example of Malaysia, and how environmental threats produce violent conflict in some of the world's poorest regions.
"We've launched a lot of different initiatives like the Malaysia initiative, the Beehive Initiative at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. And that's why I'm going to Jakarta [the] day after tomorrow to be there for the inauguration of a man who was elected president in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country, in large part because of his commitment to good, honest governance," Kerry affirmed.
"That's why we're engaging in private sector efforts to help the young Syrian refugees. And in many places we see the desert increasingly creeping into East Africa. We're seeing herders and farmers pushed into deadly conflict as a result. We're seeing the Himalayan glaciers receding, which will affect the water that is critical to rice and to other agriculture on both sides of the Himalayas. These are our challenges," he stressed.
Kerry also briefly noted that the US and Russia are still working toward a nuclear deal with Iran in "a fair and thoughtful way that achieves all of our goals," and expressed his pride at the announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize would be going to a young Muslim female, Malala Yousafzai
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