BRUSSELS (Dispatches) –
European Union leader Charles Michel has warned that the Zionist regime’s war on Gaza could create a surge in refugees heading for Europe, raising the risk of spurring on anti-migrant forces, deepening divisions and inflaming tensions between supporters of the occupying regime and the Palestinians.
“Look, if there would be more difficulties at the regional level, we would have immediately huge difficulties on the European soil because of the refugees,” EU Council President Michel said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“And we know how it can be used by some political groups within the EU to fuel some controversies and to make the EU more fragmented,” he said, adding it could increase polarization on one of the most contentious issues in many European nations.
“We know that in our societies across the EU, there are also different feelings, emotions among our citizens, and this is very important not to import within the EU the tragic conflict,” he said. “This is not the time to have more difficulty because we will import in the EU conflicts.”
One week ahead of the EU-U.S. summit in Washington with President Biden, the two longstanding trans-Atlantic partners have been caught up in the increasingly frantic diplomatic efforts to prevent the war from escalating.
The Zionist regime warned civilians living in the northern part of Gaza, which has a population of more than 1 million people, to leave the area, ahead of an expected ground offensive by the occupying regime’s military.
To have an immediate impact as the battle around Gaza intensifies, Michel called for increased immediate outreach to nations like Egypt, which would be a natural point of reception for those fleeing neighboring Gaza.
It would mean that international aid would have to increase.
However, Egypt says it already hosts millions of refugees and has signaled its reluctance to take many more from Gaza.
“You can imagine for such a country with some financial and economic challenges what it means. It means that we need to engage with those countries to see what we can do in order to support the initiatives taken by some leaders in the region, taken by some in United Nations to allow some corridor, humanitarian corridor,” he said.