SPAIN’S Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has once again insisted that his government will support the recognition of Palestine ‘as a state in its own right’.
Speaking at a political rally in the northern city of Vitoria on Saturday, he also stated that ‘no country deserves to be massacred’, in reference to Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza.
His words came at the end of a week that saw seven workers from the NGO World Central Kitchen (WCK) killed by an Israeli air strike. WCK is run by Spanish chef Jose Andres.
Sanchez said in reference to the atrocity that ‘no volunteer deserved to die’.
The Socialist Party (PSOE) leader has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel’s recent actions among European Union leaders.
Earlier this week he denounced the explanations about the deaths of the WCK workers from his counterpart in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, as ‘totally unacceptable and insufficient’.
Netanyahu had brushed off the air attack on the aid workers saying: “This happens in wartime.”
On Saturday Sanchez also stated that ‘there is no United Nations resolution that deserves to be unfulfilled for decades’.
“That is why the Spanish government is going to support the recognition of Palestine as a state in its own right and of course we are going to work for peace in the Middle East,” he said, in comments reported by news agency Europa Press.
The prime minister also slammed comments made this week by one of his predecessors, Jose Maria Aznar of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), who claimed that the Palestinian state ‘does not exist’.
“The two-state solution was not invented by sanchismo,” he said, using the term referring to his policies. “But rather comes from United Nations resolutions.”
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