There will be no peace in the Middle East until both Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal human rights "in two sovereign and secure states recognising each other’s right to exist,” Foreign Minister Evarist Bartolo told his EU counterparts on Tuesday.
Bartolo told an informal meeting of EU Foreign Ministers that a stop to fighting in the troubled region would not be enough to bring peace to it.
“To give peace a chance the evictions must stop, the rockets must stop, the airstrikes must stop. But the absence of war is not enough,” he said.
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved unless the Palestinians and the Israelis enjoy the same and equal rights and freedoms guaranteed under international law both in Israel and in the Occupied Territories.”
Bartolo later told Reuters that he expected the informal meeting to lead to a joint EU call for a ceasefire, offer humanitarian aid and pledge to rekindle talks between the two sides.
Tensions between Israel and Palestine have flared up into full-blown violence over the past week, with thousands of rockets fired and civilians on both sides killed.
Diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed have stalled and a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire was blocked by the United States, a staunch ally of Israel.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel would "continue striking at the terrorist targets".
Palestinian militant group Hamas has threatened to fire more rockets at Tel Aviv if Israeli bombing of residential areas does not stop.
In his speech on Tuesday, Bartolo argued that there had been no concerted effort to achieve lasting peace in the troubled region for the past quarter-century, since the Oslo peace accords were signed.
Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, his foreign minister Shimon Peres and Palestine’s Yasser Arafat went on to share the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for having reached that accord. But later that year, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic and the spiral of violence resumed.
“Extremists on both sides, feeding on each other, have killed and are still killing all attempts at building peace,” Bartolo said.
“Wars have not worked. It is peace that has not been given a real chance since the Oslo Accords.”