”There priority is to follow the Italians” and ”guarantee the safety of the Italians in Gaza’‘. Thus the vice prime minister and foreign minister Antonio Tajani more than two weeks after the Hamas attack. ”The Italians who are in the Gaza Strip are 7 with Italian passports, 7 with Italian-Palestinian passports and another 4 who are Palestinians, children or wives,” she explained.
”The Italian embassy in Cairo is ready to go and recover these 19, 14 Italians and their families, to bring them home” as soon as possible, added Tajani in an interview with Sky Tg24.
”The news is quite comforting as regards our fellow citizens” in the Gaza Strip, who ”through the humanitarian convoys have received something to eat and drink”, declared the deputy prime minister.
Their exit via the Rafah crossing with Egypt is more difficult. ”The controls at the Rafah crossing are very strict to prevent Hamas militiamen from infiltrating people leaving the Gaza Strip together with Palestinians and citizens with dual nationality,” explained the head of the Farnesina.
As for the three dead Italians, they are ”a deep wound”, Tajani said, adding: ”We met their families and tried to encourage them.”
And after advising against “travel to Lebanon, even if there are only soldiers in the area most at risk”, he underlined how it is “right that Hamas is hit by Israel because it is continuing to launch rockets and Israel must protect itself”. The head of the Farnesina recognized that ”it is difficult to strike Hamas without hitting the civilian population” because ”Hamas uses the civilian population to act as a shield” and ”sometimes hides weapons in schools, hospitals, sacred places” . It is ‘Hamas that we condemn, as a terrorist organization’ ‘and ‘not the Palestinian people, who are not Hamas and have the right to have their own state,” he said. ”Obviously, Israel’s right to defend itself is recognized and also to strike Hamas while being careful not to strike civilians,” added the head of the Farnesina.
”We are working with Israel and the Arab countries to ensure that the hostages are released without conditions, so that Hamas stops attacking Israel and Hezbollah,” added Tajani, explaining that he had asked the Arab countries, including Tunisia, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan, to play a mediating role.
In any case ”two peoples and two states is an objective to work towards and which we must never give up, otherwise we give in to the logic of war”. ”We need to negotiate with Israel and the United Nations,” but in the Gaza Strip, ”an intervention similar to that in southern Lebanon with the presence of UNIFIL can be envisaged,” he declared. A ”UN force of interposition and guarantee”, said Tajani, ”is a hypothesis” and would have the objective of ”preventing a resurgence of the remnants of Hamas and avoiding a clash between Israelis and Palestinians” .
Finally, as regards Italy, we need to ”keep our guard up without creating alarmism”. ”We have no signs of possible attacks, but the police are at work, eyes open, without creating panic, there is no need to be pure,” Tajani reiterated.
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