[attach id=387435 size="medium" align="left"]French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius at yesterday’s session of the National Assembly in Paris. Photo: Charles Platiau/ Reuters[/attach]

France warned yesterday it would recognise a Palestinian state if a final international effort to overcome the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians failed, and proposed a two-year timeframe to end the conflict through a UN-backed resolution.

Lawmakers will hold a symbolic parliamentary vote on December 2 on whether the French government should recognise Palestine as a state, a move that the Israeli Prime Minister has called a “grave mistake”.

“If this final effort to reach a negotiated solution fails, then France will have to do what it takes by recognising without delay the Palestinian state.

“We are ready,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told Parliament.

The parliamentary vote has raised domestic political pressure for the government to be more active on the issue.

An IFOP poll showed 63 per cent of French support a Palestinian state.

Poll showed 63 per cent of French support a Palestinian state

Fabius told deputies that, were they to adopt the motion, it would not change Paris’s immediate diplomatic stance.

But he said that, after similar moves in Sweden, Britain, Ireland and Spain, Paris could not ignore the “never-ending” conflict that was playing into extremists’ hands.

Palestinians seek statehood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as their capital – lands captured by Israel in a 1967 war.

The latest round of efforts to forge a two-state solution collapsed in April. Palestinians see little choice but to push unilaterally for statehood.