Egypt and Jordan today blamed Israel for the ‘dangerous escalation’ in the Middle East, following the attack in Beirut that killed a Hezbollah commander and the death, attributed to Israeli forces, of a Hamas leader in Iran.
The foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, Badr Abdelatty and Ayman Safadi respectively, issued a joint statement in which they accused Israel of initiating this ‘dangerous escalation’ through ‘Israeli aggression in Gaza, violations of international law, illegal practices in the West Bank and political assassinations’.
The leaders also urged the UN Security Council to adopt a binding resolution to demand that the Jewish state stop its offensive in the Gaza Strip and ‘its continued violations of international law’.
‘During a phone call, the two ministers stressed the need to work calmly to prevent the region from falling into a comprehensive regional conflict that would destabilize the Middle East, especially after the recent Israeli escalation,’ they stressed in the joint statement.
Egypt is, along with Qatar, the main mediator between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza war, while it is also, along with Jordan, one of the first Arab countries to normalize its relations with the Jewish state after signing a peace agreement.
The ministers also condemned the ‘political assassinations’, without going into details, nor did they accuse Israel of launching the attack in the early hours of this morning that killed Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, for which the Jewish state did not take responsibility.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued today that Israel has dealt ‘severe blows’ to its enemies in recent days, explicitly mentioning the elimination of Hezbollah's Lebanese military leader, Fouad Chokr, in the Beirut attack.
Netanyahu guaranteed that Fouad Chokr was ‘directly responsible’ for the deaths on Saturday in the attack on the Druze town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in Syria.
Israel has so far remained silent on the death of Haniye, who was born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.
The Iranian government announced three days of national mourning, condemning the ‘brutal act’ which, it emphasized, ‘added another leaf to the shameful list of crimes committed by the criminal and usurping Zionist sect [Israel]’.
Ayatollah Khamenei, for his part, warned that Iran will take revenge on Israel.
