ANKARA: Iran’s attack on Israel represents a major escalation of an already very tense situation in the region, the EU foreign policy chief said Wednesday.
‘Iran’s attack against Israel was unprecedented, it never happened before. It is the first time that Iran directly attacked Israel from its territory with hundreds, hundreds of drones and missiles,’ Josep Borrell told members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
‘This aerial attack represents a major escalation of an already very tense situation in the region,’ he said, and added that Lebanon was ‘once again embroiled in an extremely fragile situation.’
Possible solutions
Borrell emphasized the importance of diplomacy to solve the issues in the Middle East.
‘Sanctions alone cannot deter Iran. Sanctions alone cannot solve the risk of escalation and place has to be given to diplomacy,’ he said.
‘I think this is the moment for diplomacy, to deploy maximum diplomatic efforts to act to calm down the situation and ask everybody to play its part,’ the
foreign policy chief said.
Responding to Belgian member of the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt’s intervention, who questioned the sanctions on Iranian individuals imposed by the EU, Borrell said that the bloc will expand the already existing restrictive measures against Iran.
“EU maintains a comprehensive sanction on Iran, including more than 500 designated individuals, Mr. Verhofstadt, not four or five, 500. You simply forgot to multiply by 100, a small mistake … You forgot two zeros. You have to go back to school to learn a little bit about mathematics,” he said.
On sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), he said that the EU has placed the entire IRGC under the Iran weapons of mass destruction sanctions regime, which includes an asset freeze and a prohibition to make funds and economic resources available to it.
“In other words, listing this organization as a terrorist organization would have no practical effect,” he said, added: “The addition of entities or individuals to
the so-called EU terrorist list … is subject to a decision by the (European) Council by unanimity.”
He added that EU will continue its diplomatic engagement with all key partners in the region.
He drew attention to the situation in Gaza, which ‘remains at the epicenter of the regional tensions.’
‘Peace from our point of view can only be obtained through political process that leads to a two-state solution,’ Borrell said.
Iran on April 13 launched an airborne attack on Israel in retaliation for an earlier airstrike on its diplomatic compound in the Syrian capital. It reportedly fired more than 300 drones and missiles, with almost all intercepted by the air defense systems of Israel and its allies – the US, France, and the UK.
Israel has waged a deadly military offensive on the Palestinian territory since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas which killed nearly 1,200 people.
Over 34,180 Palestinians have since been killed and more than 77,000 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessi
ties.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which in January issued an interim ruling that ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
Source: Anadolu Agency