Spain on Thursday called for a de-escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, as Lebanon said 37 people had now been killed by Israelis detonations of booby-trapped hand-held devices.
“Today the risk of escalation is once more increasing in a dangerous way” in Lebanon, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a news conference in Madrid after more than an hour of talks with visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“So we must again make a fresh appeal for restraint, for a de-escalation and for 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, modeled 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 formally recognized 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 own state,” Sanchez said.
Abbas expressed his thanks for Sanchez’s support and Spain’s recognition, urging “all states that have not yet recognized 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 on Thursday called on the United Nations to intervene in what he called Israel’s “technological war” against it.
Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said Thursday that 37 people had been killed and more than 3,500 wounded in the explosions of the devices over the last two days.
Palestinian state recognition
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 the Palestinian resistance 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 toward Israel’s conduct of its campaign against Hamas.
“The international community and Europe cannot remain impassive in the face of the suffering of thousands of innocents, largely women and children,” he added.
Israeli attacks killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to local health officials. The U.N. has acknowledged these figures as reliable.
The latest conflict erupted after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, resulting in the deaths of about 1,200 people on the Israeli side, according to Israeli figures.
