St. Petersburg, Russia – British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called today for the deployment of international forces to stop the fighting in the Mideast.
“The blunt reality is that this violence is not going to stop unless we create the conditions for the cessation of violence,” Blair said after talks with Annan on the margins of the Group of Eight summit. “The only way is if we have a deployment of international forces that can stop bombardment coming into Israel.”
Annan appealed to Israel to abide by international law, spare civilian lives and infrastructure.
He also said that the United Nations was considering evacuation plans for U.N. dependents from Lebanon, while Blair said Britain was looking at the possibility of creating an air bridge for its citizens.
Their comments came a day after world leaders forged a unified response at their G-8 summit to the crisis in the Middle East, blaming Hezbollah and Hamas for the escalating violence and recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself – although they called on the Jewish state to show restraint.
The plan, hammered out after hours of intense negotiations at the Group of Eight summit, called for “an immediate end to the current violence” and had raised the prospect of an international security force along the Israeli-Lebanese border to separate fighting forces, a potentially significant escalation of outside involvement in the historically volatile region.
The statement by the leaders placed blame for the intensifying crisis squarely on the “extremist forces” of Hamas and Hezbollah, just as Bush has done from the beginning.
But it also went further than he had been willing to go in demanding that Israel “exercise utmost restraint” and “avoid casualties among innocent civilians” in its retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
The leaders demanded that Hamas and Hezbollah return unharmed Israeli soldiers they have seized in recent weeks and stop shelling Israeli towns, while telling Israel to call off its military operations, withdraw forces quickly from Gaza and release Palestinian ministers and legislators arrested since the latest wave of conflict began last month.
U.S. officials said afterward that the plan envisioned Israel taking those actions only after Hamas and Hezbollah complied first, but the statement did not set an order.
