Eduardo González
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares expressed his conviction that the European Union will join Spain in vetoing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, following the controversial video showing this member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government humiliating activists detained in the latest Israeli raid on the Global Sumud Flotilla.
“We have 44 of our citizens from the Flotilla currently in Turkey,” Albares told reporters on Thursday upon arriving for the second day of the North Atlantic Council ministerial meeting, held in Helsingborg, Sweden.
“They were received by our ambassador (Cristina Latorre) and by the staff of the Spanish Embassy upon their arrival,” he continued. “They are expected to travel from Turkey to Spain gradually throughout the day,” he announced.
The activists “who required medical attention—and there were four of them—received it, and three citizens who needed it are also being documented,” he specified. “We are fully operational, both our Embassy in Turkey and our Embassy in Israel, as well as the central services, to facilitate their return and provide them with all the consular protection they need to return to Spain,” he concluded.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported this Thursday, via social media, that “all the foreign activists” from the latest intercepted flotilla had “been deported from Israel.”
On Wednesday, Albares delivered a diplomatic note (the highest-ranking formal protest document) to the Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, demanding the immediate release of the Spanish activists, “illegally detained in international waters (specifically, near Cyprus), where no Israeli agent has any jurisdiction.”
He also urgently summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires in Madrid, Dana Erlich, to convey his condemnation of the release of a monstrous, inhumane, and disgraceful video showing members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, including the Spanish, being treated unjustly and humiliatingly by Itamar Ben Gvir. Gideon Saar himself described the release of the video as shameful.
Regarding the possibility that Spain might propose European sanctions against this Israeli minister during the upcoming informal meeting of foreign ministers (in the Gymnich format), to be held in Cyprus on May 27 and 28, Albares noted that Spain has already applied similar measures at the national level against Itamar Ben Gvir and the Israeli Finance Minister, the far-right Bezalel Smotrich, who have been banned from entering Spain for many months.
However, he expressed confidence in securing similar sanctions at the EU level, a measure which, he noted, requires unanimity. “I believe that, now that we have seen the brutality of that video and the sensitivity it has raised, not only in Spain, where it was already present, but practically in every country in Europe, we will be able to move forward,” he stated. “I was just speaking with my Polish and Italian colleagues while waiting for my turn with the press, and we were discussing it,” he added.