Tuesday, January 2, 2024
Year : 1, Issue : 18
Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair has strongly denied an Israeli media report linking him to talks last week about the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza in other countries.
Channel 12 claimed on Sunday that Blair, who left office in 2007 and was a Middle East envoy charged with building up Palestinian institutions, was in Israel last week.
The news channel said he held meetings with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior minister Benny Gantz about a mediation role after the war with Hamas.
He could also act as a go-between with moderate Arab states about the ‘voluntary resettlement’ of Gazans, it added.
But the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a non-profit organisation he set up in 2016, said the report was ‘a lie’.
Israel’s relentless military response has killed more than 22,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
United Nations agencies have voiced alarm over a spiralling humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where 2.4 million Palestinians remain under siege and bombardment, most of them displaced and huddling in shelters and tents, amid dire food shortages.
Source: Agence France-Presse. London
