ABU DHABI: The UAE has called for a temporary international mission to lay the foundation for a new governance in Gaza after the war ends.

In a statement posted by the UAE state news agency on Thursday, Reem bint Ebrahim Al-Hashimy, the country’s minister of state for international cooperation, said the mission would help establish law and order and respond to the humanitarian crisis in post-war Gaza.

The mission should be deployed at the invitation of the Palestinian government, led by “a credible and independent new prime minister” to address the needs of the Palestinian people and rebuild Gaza, Al-Hashimy said.

It would pave the way to reunite Gaza and the occupied West Bank under a single, legitimate Palestinian Authority.

Al-Hashimy said that a return to the status quo before Oct. 7 would not achieve sustainable peace in Gaza, which is imperative for regional stability.

She urged the US to lead international efforts to rebuild Gaza, reach the two-state solution, and facilitate Palestinian reforms, all of which would contribute to the success of the international mission.

Israel, she said, must also do its part in following international humanitarian law.

“Gaza cannot recover if it continues to live under a blockade, or if the legitimate Palestinian Authority is not allowed to take on its responsibilities and to stop withholding its financing,” she said, highlighting the need to halt the construction of illegal Israeli settlements and end the violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Al-Hashimy reaffirmed the UAE’s support for international efforts to achieve the two-state solution.

“The outcome we endeavor to achieve extends beyond the Gaza Strip and necessitates comprehensive cooperation. Moreover, establishing peace is to everyone’s advantage on a broader scale, benefiting the entire Middle East and the global community,” she said.

Midyat: Through a basement door in southeastern Turkiye lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century before Jesus Christ.
Archaeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020.
Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120 meters of tunnel carved out of the rock.

But that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000-square-meter area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkiye’s southern Anatolia region.
“Maybe even in the world,” said Midyat conservation director Mervan Yavuz who oversaw the excavation.
“To protect themselves from the climate, enemies, predators and diseases, people took refuge in these caves which they turned into an actual city,” Yavuz added.
The art historian traces the city’s ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC.
At its height in the seventh century BC, the empire stretched from The Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west.
Referred to as Matiate in that period, the city’s original entrance required people to bend in half and squeeze themselves into a circular opening.
It was this entrance that first gave the Midyat municipality an inkling of its subterranean counterpart’s existence.
“We actually suspected that it existed,” Yavuz recounted as he walked through the cave’s gloom.

“In the 1970s, the ground collapsed and a construction machine fell down. But at the time we didn’t try to find out more, we just strengthened and closed up the hole.”
The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world.
Many major empires conquered or passed through these lands, which may have given those living around Matiate a reason to take refuge underground.
“Before the arrival of the Arabs, these lands were fiercely disputed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and then the Byzantines,” said Ekrem Akman, a historian at the nearby University of Mardin.
Yavuz noted that “Christians from the Hatay region, fleeing from the persecution of the Roman Empire... built monasteries in the mountains to avoid their attacks.”
He suspects that Jews and Christians may have used Matiate as a hiding place to practice their then-banned religions underground.
He pointed to the inscrutable stylized carvings — a horse, an eight-point star, a hand, trees — which adorn the walls, as well as a stone slab on the floor of one room that may have been used for celebrations or for sacrifices.
As a result of the city’s long continuous occupation, he said it was “difficult to pinpoint” exactly what at the site can be attributed to which period or group.
But “pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, all these believers contributed to the underground city of Matiate,” Yavuz said.
Even after the threat of centuries of invasions had passed, the caves stayed in use, said curator Gani Tarkan.
He used to work as a director at the Mardin Museum, where household items, bronzes and potteries recovered from the caves are on display.
“People continued to use this place as a living space,” Tarkan said.
“Some rooms were used as catacombs, others as storage space,” he added.
Excavation leader Yavuz pointed to a series of round holes dug to hold wine-filled amphorae vessels in the gloomy cool, out of the glaring sunlight above.
To this day, the Mardin region’s Orthodox Christian community maintains that old tradition of wine production.
Turkiye is also famous for its ancient cave villages in Cappadocia in the center of the country.
But while Cappadocia’s underground cities are built with rooms vertically stacked on top of each other, Matiate spreads out horizontally, Tarkan explained.
The municipality of Midyat, which funds the works, plans to continue the excavation until the site can be opened to the public.
It hopes the site will prove a popular tourist attraction and attract visitors to the city of 120,000.