Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that this Thursday, September 25, a Navy vessel will depart from the port of Cartagena with the mission of assisting the Sumud Global Flotilla and rescuing its Spanish members in the event of an attack by Israel.
“A maritime action vessel equipped with all the necessary resources will set sail from Cartagena tomorrow in case it is necessary to assist the Flotilla and carry out any rescues,” Pedro Sánchez announced this Wednesday at the press conference following his participation in the High-Level Week of the 80th UN General Assembly in New York.
The objective of this mission is that, “in the event of difficulties, the nationals and also the members of the Flotilla can be rescued, although I hope that does not happen,” Sánchez continued during the meeting with the media, held at the headquarters of the Permanent Representation of Spain to the United Nations in New York. “Other countries have taken this decision, for example, Italy,” he recalled.
In this regard, the Prime Minister recalled that the Flotilla “represents 45 countries” and that its members “are going to deliver food to the Gazan population and express the solidarity of a vast majority of the world’s countries with the suffering” of the enclave’s inhabitants.
Furthermore, the President clarified that, regardless of what happens with the Flotilla, Spain is not considering, for the moment, “breaking relations” with Israel. “There is absolute and total disagreement over the Israeli government’s response to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank,” but “it is clear that we want to preserve diplomatic relations between two countries that far exceed anything that could exist between two governments,” he stated.
“We do not know what may happen in the next two weeks or in the next few hours, but the Israeli government’s accusations against the members of the Flotilla are worrying,” he added. For this reason, Sánchez assured, in a message specifically addressed to the Government of Israel, that “Spain will protect its compatriots from a diplomatic and political perspective.”
Shortly before, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares warned from New York that those responsible for any attack on the Sumud Global Flotilla must “answer before the international courts of justice.”
“The attacks on the Sumud Global Flotilla are totally unacceptable; I categorically reject them and demand that they cease,” the minister declared from the North American city, where he is participating in the United Nations General Assembly’s Ministerial Week.
“We are talking about a humanitarian, peaceful flotilla, whose sole objective is humanitarian: to deliver basic items to the population of Gaza, who should be able to enter by land if Israel were not subjecting the strip to this blockade,” he recalled. “I am closely following events. I have spoken throughout the day with several foreign ministers from other countries who also have citizens on the flotilla,” Albares explained.
The King and Trump’s speeches: “The polar opposites”
On the other hand, Pedro Sánchez asserted that he shares “one hundred percent, from the first to the last word,” the speech given this Wednesday by King Felipe VI before the UN General Assembly, despite the fact that the King avoided the expression “genocide” and preferred to define what happened in Gaza with the term “massacre.”
In Sánchez’s opinion, the King’s speech was “more necessary than ever” in his “defense of multilateralism and its reform and of a vision of foreign policy based on cooperation rather than confrontation,” because “many debates that are common sense are ideologized.”
“Either you are for human rights or you are not for human rights,” he warned. The events in Gaza and Ukraine, he asserted, “have nothing to do with being left or right, they have to do with humanity.” “We defend the same values in Ukraine and Gaza, and this consistency is what earns us the great respect of the international community,” he added.
In this same vein, Sánchez affirmed that both his own speech and that of the King are “the polar opposites” of the one delivered Tuesday by US President Donald Trump before the General Assembly, in all aspects, such as the climate emergency, global health, and “the situation in Gaza.” “From the outset, we condemned Hamas’s attacks and called for the release of the hostages,” but “it’s one thing to have the right to defend oneself and another to indiscriminately kill people in Gaza and what we are seeing in the West Bank,” he added.
