NEW YORK — The Palestinian delegation was not in the room. For the second consecutive year, the United States denied visas to Palestinian officials seeking to attend the General Assembly, which meant that the governments gathering on Tuesday to debate Palestinian statehood were doing so in the absence of the people whose future they had convened to discuss.
That absence shaped the day’s defining meeting — a four-nation session titled “The Road Ahead,” convened on the sidelines of the General Assembly by Canada, France, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. The gathering was framed around the first anniversary of the New York Declaration, in which world leaders pledged to end the war in Gaza and committed to a 20-point peace framework. One year on, not one of its provisions has been implemented.
“Some boast of a supposed peace,” French President Emmanuel Macron told world leaders in what he described as his final address to the General Assembly before leaving office. “But that peace has not reopened humanitarian access for a single second. Are we simply to stand by and watch this spectacle that should shame us all?”
The remark was aimed at Donald Trump, who had spent the week in New York presenting what his administration calls a concluded ceasefire as evidence that the conflict in Gaza was over. The White House did not attend the Road Ahead meeting. Spokeswoman Anna Kelly responded from Washington that Trump had “ended the war between Israel and Hamas” — a statement that carried no acknowledgment of the Palestinians killed since the ceasefire took effect and no response to Macron’s specific claim that not a single humanitarian corridor had been reopened.
What distinguished Tuesday’s address from previous denunciations is the institutional weight Macron brings to it this month. France holds the presidency of the United Nations Security Council for September 2026, giving Paris the power to set the council’s agenda, call emergency sessions, and force votes on resolutions the United States has repeatedly blocked. French diplomats have indicated Paris intends to use the presidency to bring the two-state solution before the council for a substantive vote before the month ends — the first time such a vote would be forced under France’s direct chairmanship.
France recognised Palestinian statehood in August 2025, one of the first major European powers to do so formally. Macron’s UNGA speech was not a conversion moment. It was the continuation of a policy France enacted a year ago, now amplified by the Security Council presidency and delivered before a General Assembly at which the international consensus on Palestinian sovereignty has continued to harden.
Saudi Arabia’s presence at the meeting carried a precise signal beyond the ceremonial. Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan co-hosted alongside Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a visible statement that Riyadh has not quietly softened its position that Palestinian statehood remains a precondition for normalisation with Israel. The kingdom’s posture shapes the architecture of the negotiations Washington is simultaneously conducting, and the Gulf states’ approach at UNGA this week makes clear that the American sell is harder than the administration has acknowledged publicly.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called a two-state solution “the only credible path” to any durable outcome. Carney announced C$100 million in new Canadian funding, with C$80 million for immediate humanitarian relief and C$20 million for peace and security infrastructure. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, at his first General Assembly in that role, said Israelis and Palestinians must eventually live “side by side in peace and security” — language that stopped short of Macron’s directness but reached the same conclusion. Israel’s government responded to Macron specifically. A spokesperson called his remarks a “grotesque absurdity” and accused him of siding with Hamas, Middle East Eye reported.
