(Adnkronos) – Italy is ready to send more paramilitary Carabinieri police officers to the war-devastated Gaza Strip in a bid to shore up the shaky ceasefire and create “real peace” between Israel and the enclave’s Islamist Palestinian ruling group Hamas, foreign minister Antonio Tajani said on Monday.
“We must ensure that the truce in Gaza becomes real peace. There is much to do, much work to be done,” Tajani told reporters on the sidelines of the MED9 summit in Portoroz, Slovenia.
Monday’s conference came after a day of Israeli strikes in Gaza killed 26 people according to Hamas after the Israeli military (IDF) said an attack killed two of its soldiers. Sunday’s raids struck Hamas targets, IDF said.
Italy is playing a leading role in peace efforts and “is ready to reinforce the presence of our Carabinieri at the Rafah crossing (at Gaza’s border with Egypt),” Tajani said.
“I have discussed this with (Italy’s defence) minister Guido Crosetto,” Tajani continued.
Carabinieri are serving in the occupied Palestinian territories as part of two European Union missions and are currently deployed in Jericho, in the West Bank as well as in Rafah.
“We are working hard with Jordan and Egypt on Gaza,” he said, noting that Italy will take part in the (international) conference on reconstruction (which Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi said on Sunday his country will host next month), Tajani went on.
Italy is also set to deploy a training mission to Jordan’s capital, Amman, including in the health field, Tajani said.
And after a first group of 39 Palestinian students and researchers arrived in Italy at the beginning of October, “another 100 university students are due to arrive in Italy,” Tajani noted.
“The goal is to contribute to the training of the future Palestinian leadership,” Tajani underlined.
The government has awarded over 150 scholarships to Palestinian students from Gaza and over 50 to students from the West Bank and is working to create “university corridors” to allow the scholarship-holders to study at Italian higher education institutions, according to the foreign ministry.
