Spanish PM, Palestinian leader urge Mideast de-escalation

AFP | Madrid

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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez yesterday called for a de-escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, as Lebanon said 37 people had now been killed by booby-trapped handheld devices. “Today the risk of escalation is once more increasing dangerously” in Lebanon, Sanchez told a news conference in Madrid after more than an hour of talks with visiting Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

“So we must again make a fresh appeal for restraint, for a de-escalation and peaceful coexistence between countries, in the name of peace,” he added. Abbas also called for a new peace conference in the Spanish capital aimed at ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, modelled on the 1991 Madrid talks that led to the 1993 Oslo accords. Urging a two-state solution, long a cornerstone of international attempts to end the decades-long conflict, Sanchez said a Palestinian nation “living side by side with the state of Israel” was the only way to “bring stability to the region”. Abbas’s visit was his first to Spain since Madrid decided to recognise a Palestinian state on May 28. Ireland and Norway took the same decision in May.

“Why is this a good thing? Because Palestine exists and has the right to have its state,” Sanchez said. Abbas expressed his thanks for Sanchez’s support and Spain’s recognition, urging “all states that have not yet recognised us to do so”. Neither Sanchez nor Abbas referred directly to the explosions of electronic devices that rocked Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday in the latest escalation of tensions.

Israel has not yet commented on the unprecedented wave of attacks in which Hezbollah operatives’ pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals. But Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati yesterday called on the United Nations to intervene in what he called Israel’s “technological war” against it. Even before that stunning act of apparent sabotage, tensions were running high in the Middle East, in large part due to the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Since the war began, Sanchez has positioned himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause within the European Union. His socialist government has increasingly taken highly critical positions towards Israel’s conduct of its campaign against Hamas, rival to Abbas’s own Fatah party which controls the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.