The President of the Government ended his tour of the Middle East this Friday, opening the door for Spain to recognize the Palestinian State and warning that if the European Union does not agree on this point, Spain "will make its own decisions."
Pedro Sánchez, in a press conference held in Rafah, the southern gateway to the Gaza Strip, insisted, as he has been doing throughout this trip, that "the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, including thousands of children and Girls, it is totally unacceptable.”
These statements unleashed a diplomatic crisis between both countries to the point that the foreign ministers of the two countries have called their respective ambassadors for consultations.
The first to do so was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Hebrew State, Eli Cohen, who ordered the summons of the ambassadors of Spain and Belgium – the Belgian Prime Minister, Alexander de Croo, accompanied Sánchez on the trip as the next president of the Council – to a harsh reprimanding conversation.
Cohen condemned “the false claims of the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium, who support terrorism.” He defended that Israel is acting “in accordance with international law and fighting a murderous terrorist organization worse than ISIS, which commits war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harshly condemned the comments of both Sánchez and De Croo, alleging that the two leaders “did not attribute full responsibility to Hamas for the crimes against humanity that it perpetrated, massacring Israeli citizens and using Palestinians as human shields.”
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, later responded by summoning the Israeli ambassador after describing the Jewish State's accusations as “unacceptable.” For its part, the PP considered that Sánchez “creates problems for Spain.”
Until now, Sánchez had ruled out unilateral recognition by Spain of the Palestinian State, always conditioning it on it being a decision shared with other European partners. But this Friday he went one step further, contemplating such unilateral recognition of Spain, if the international community and the EU delay this decision.
The Rafah crossing, between Egypt and Gaza and one of the epicenters of the humanitarian crisis – where this Friday the exchange of Jewish hostages for Palestinian prisoners began – impressed Sánchez as, the day before, the visit he made to the kibbutz of Be'eri, in which Hamas was most fierce in the October 7 attack.
In the morning, Sánchez and the Prime Minister of Belgium visited Egyptian President Al Sisi in Cairo, one of the key actors in the region and in the negotiations that achieved the uncertain truce agreed upon. The Spanish president explained to the Egyptian Rais that the day before he visited with De Croo the top political leaders of Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu and Mahmud Abbas. “The terrible traces of the terrorist attacks committed by Hamas on October 7 are testimony to the cruelest facet of humanity. But the answer cannot be the death of innocent civilians in Gaza,” Sánchez warned Al Sisi. And, before traveling to Rafah, he denounced that “more than two million people are trapped in the horrors of war” in Gaza. So one of the messages he conveyed to the Egyptian president was the same one he conveyed to the Prime Minister of Israel the day before: “We must stop this humanitarian catastrophe.”
Sánchez is very aware that the political process in search of a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, will be very complex. But it is his firm bet. “Netanyahu is in a position of war, his language and his objectives are warlike, while he is waiting for the release of hostages,” as the Spanish president acknowledged. “He is in a logic of war.” The conversation between the two was frank, without subterfuge. Sánchez is one of the international leaders who most forcefully denounces the massacre of innocent civilians. “We must tell friendly countries the truth,” he justified.
