MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Friday urged the international community to stop selling weapons to Israel as he condemned attacks by Israel’s armed forces against the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon.
Israeli forces fired at an observation post used by U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Friday, injuring two, a U.N. source said, the third day in a row peacekeepers have reported Israeli fire at their positions as Israel wages war on Hezbollah.
None of the Spanish soldiers who were part of the mission were hit, the Spanish Defence Ministry said on Friday.
Spain has deployed 650 peacekeepers in Lebanon and a Spanish general leads the mission.
“Let me at this point criticise and condemn the attacks that the Israeli armed forces are carrying out on the United Nations mission in Lebanon,” Sanchez, whose country has been critical of Israel in the recent escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, said after meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Sanchez said Spain stopped selling weapons to Israel in October 2023 and urged the rest of the world to do the same to prevent further escalation in the region.
“I think it is urgent given what is happening in the Middle East that the international community stops exporting weapons to the Israeli government,” he said.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro; writing by Emma Pinedo; editing by Andrei Khalip and Charlie Devereux and Toby Chopra)
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