Guterres warns two-state conditions being ‘systematically erased’
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a $71.4 million aid package for Palestine on Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly, splitting the funds between humanitarian assistance and West Bank security capacity-building as his government works to preserve a two-state solution amid Israeli settlement expansion.
Of the total, $56.8 million is designated for humanitarian aid and $14.2 million will support peace and security capacity-building, including police training in the occupied West Bank, Carney said at a press conference held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The announcement came ahead of a meeting Carney co-hosted with France, Britain, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the two-state solution and implementation of a UN Security Council resolution calling for large-scale humanitarian access to Gaza.
Carney framed the announcement against what he described as an ongoing humanitarian crisis and parallel security threats. “In Gaza immense human suffering continues. Next door, Israelis continue to live with existential threats from Hamas and from Iran and its proxies,” he said.
He tied the pledge to a longstanding Canadian position on Palestinian statehood. “A long-held international consensus for a two-state solution — a consensus held by every one of my predecessors since the formation of this organization, that long-held consensus will mean nothing if these conditions continue, and so Canada is doing what it can to help change the trajectory,” Carney said.
The announcement extends Canadian diplomatic efforts that have intensified since Carney assumed office in March 2025. Much of that work has focused on preserving the West Bank as Palestinian territory and pushing back on Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, which is widely considered illegal under international law.
Two weeks before Tuesday’s announcement, Canada joined Britain and France in announcing plans to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. That step followed Israel’s mid-August acceptance of tenders to construct 1,234 housing units as part of the E1 settlement project, a long-planned development that would divide the West Bank and undermine the territorial contiguity of a future Palestinian state.
The E1 project has drawn widespread international condemnation that for decades kept it largely shelved. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated last month on Telegram that construction of E1 is “a huge step” toward removing the idea of a Palestinian state from the agenda, an idea he called “an existential danger to the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”
Carney on Tuesday said that Canada and its partners recognize Israel’s endorsement of the E1 settlement plan as a “direct threat to peace” and that they had reluctantly announced their intentions to restrict goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“This is a pragmatic, practical action that works towards the preservation of the possibility of a two-state solution and ultimately a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians,” Carney said.
At the meeting that followed the press conference, Guterres said support for a two-state solution must be more than words under the threat posed by Israeli settlement expansion. “The conditions for an independent, democratic, contiguous, viable and sovereign Palestinian State are being systematically erased,” he said, adding that the ultimate goal is two sovereign, democratic states — Israel and Palestine.
“There is simply no alternative,” Guterres said. “Time is running out.”