Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide says his country recognises the state of Palestine “because it’s the right thing to do, but even more importantly because it’s the right time to do it”, Al Jazeera reports.

Speaking at a news conference in Brussels with his Spanish and Irish counterparts, he said, “For many years, we and so many other countries were expecting to recognise at the end of a peace process.

“But then a few years ago, we realised that we actually needed to think outside the box”, he said, adding that recognition needed to come at a time that sent “a strong signal”.

“Some people might think it sounds paradoxical to talk about Tuesday’s solution [recognition of the state of Palestine] in the midst of war,” he said.

“Right now, we have extreme violence in Gaza. We have Israelis living in fear of terrorism and rocket attacks, and we have settler violence and the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank,” he continued.

“We are now seeing a cycle of violence. This is a low point in the long and sad history of a non-solution to the Israel-Palestine problem.

“I think what we’re giving now is new software. It’s a 2.0 to that vision where earlier recognition of Palestine is one of the several pieces of the big puzzle of how to bring peace to the Middle East,” he said.