Greece FM: Israel not facing sufficient pressure to end Gaza war

Israel is not facing sufficient pressure to end the war in Gaza and the escalation in Lebanon is a minefield that the international community may not be able to deal with, Greece’s foreign minister says.

Greece was elected as a member of the United Nations Security Council for 2025-2026 earlier this year, and Athens believes the country’s historical ties with the Arab world and Israel give it credibility to act as a peace-broker.

“It seems that there is no effective pressure upon Israel. We are friends of Israel, and we’re strategic partners of Israel, and we’re trying to be as open and sincere with them,” George Gerapetritis tells Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

“The truth is that at the moment there is a continuous, very strong reaction on the part of Israel,” he says after a meeting with European Union and Arab foreign ministers.

Gerapetritis says it is crucial that Arabs and Europeans pursue joint, rather than disparate, initiatives that could weigh on Israel, but that the escalation at the Israel-Lebanon border of the last few days showed a collective international failure.

“We have not prevented the spillover, and the more dispersed the war becomes, the more the situation becomes more complicated to be solved,” he says. “Lebanon could easily be a zone of tremendous hostility, and this is something that we cannot deal with. It’s a clear minefield.”

Since June, Greece has been seeking to convince member states in Europe to join a project to temporarily bring children hurt and traumatized by war in Gaza to the European Union.

He says those talks, along with logistical coordination with Palestinians and Israelis, are ongoing and he hopes they would bear fruit soon. He says Greece could take in some 500 children for its part.