Jordan foreign minister to press Europe on joining Gaza ceasefire calls

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi says he hopes a meeting of Mediterranean officials will help bridge a gap between Arab and European countries in calling for a humanitarian pause in Gaza to become a permanent ceasefire.

Safadi notes that while Arab nations have demanded the end of what he called Israel’s “aggression” in Gaza, most European nations have not gone that far, instead calling for a “humanitarian pause.”

“We need to bridge the gap,” Safadi said, adding that the war “is producing nothing.”

Israel and some Western allies have rejected calls for a permanent end to the fighting with Hamas terrorists still in control of the Strip and able to repeat attacks like the October 7 massacres. Hamas also still holds over 100 Israeli hostages, most of them civilians.

But Safadi says the war’s only tangible result would be death.

“What is this war achieving other than killing people, destroying their livelihoods, and again, creating an environment of hate and dehumanization that will define generations and will take us a very, very long time to navigate through toward the future that we want,” he said.

Safadi’s comments come on the eve of Monday’s Union for the Mediterranean gathering that will bring to Barcelona in northern Spain 42 delegations from Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, many of them represented by their foreign ministers.

He also accuses Israel of “acting on the fallacy that it can parachute over the Palestinian issue and have peace, the regional peace, without solving the Palestinian problem,” referring to regional peace efforts pushed by the US and ostensibly backed by Amman.

“The root cause of the conflict is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he says. “We have a conflict because we have an occupation that Israel has been consolidating. Israel has killed hope for peace, has killed prospects for peace.”