Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke at the UN General Assembly after weeks in which unauthorised flights into NATO’s airspace — intrusions the alliance blames on Russia — have raised alarm around Europe, particularly after NATO jets downed drones over Poland and Estonia said Russian fighter jets flew into its territory and lingered for 12 minutes.
Russia has denied that its planes entered Estonian airspace and has said the drones didn’t target Poland, with Moscow’s ally Belarus maintaining that Ukrainian signal-jamming sent the devices off course.
The Hamas attack killed about 1200 people in Israel; 251 were taken hostage. Israel’s sweeping offensive has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not give a breakdown of civilian and combatant deaths but says around half of those killed were women and children.
Lavrov also said there is no basis for any potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which Palestinians consider a key part of their future state, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem.
Israel hasn’t announced such a move, but several leading members in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have advocated doing so. Officials recently approved a controversial settlement project that would effectively cut the West Bank in two, a move critics say could doom chances for a Palestinian state.
Between the Gaza war and the situation in the West Bank, “we are essentially dealing with an attempt at a kind of coup d’etat aimed at burying UN decisions on the creation of a Palestinian state,” Lavrov said.
The international community has long embraced a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, saying it would reward Hamas — a position he reiterated at the General Assembly.
