The EU must be crystal clear in its support for the United Nations, says Tánaiste Micheál Martin.
Over the weekend, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the UN its peacekeepers in southern Lebanon must be ‘immediately’ withdrawn. There are also concerns that Israel is trying to decimate the UN’s role in Gaza.
“We cannot have an undermining, a chipping away, of the status or the credibility or structures of the United Nations and particularly its peacekeeping forces”, said Micheál Martin this morning in Luxembourg where EU foreign ministers are meeting today.
In a statement published yesterday by the EU’s foreign affairs chief the European Union expressed “its grave concern about the recent escalation along the Blue Line [demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel]. The EU condemns all attacks against UN missions.”
But the Tánaiste says this, and other recent EU statements against Israel’s military operations, have not gone far enough.
“Quite a number of our EU member states really need to stand up now on the side of what’s right and proper and moral in terms of humanity…I’m surprised that some EU colleagues, states, have not been as forcefully as strong in supporting UN peacekeeping troops that they could be.”
In today’s meeting “I will be saying to my colleagues, there can be no equivocation.”
“Israel is essentially now undermining the United Nations, and the United Nations peacekeeping force with the very rules based international order, and it needs to step back”, Micheál Martin added.