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King Felipe of Spain has begged Israel to “stop the massacre” and end its “abhorrent acts” in Gaza during an unusually direct and powerful address to the UN general assembly in which he also defended the UN’s role in an increasingly “frenetic and out of control” world.
Although the monarch was careful not to use the word “genocide” – a term already employed by the country’s outspoken prime minister, Pedro Sánchez – he said Spain and others were at a loss to understand Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“We can’t keep silent, nor look the other way, when confronted with so much devastation, with the bombing – even of hospitals, schools and places of refuge – or with so many deaths among the civilian population, or with the famine and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people – to what end?” he said on Wednesday.
“These are abhorrent acts that are the very opposite of everything that this forum represents. They sicken the human conscience and shame the entire international community.”
Diplomatic relations between Spain and Israel have curdled as a result of the Gaza offensive, with Madrid introducing several measures, including an arms embargo, and Sánchez accusing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger”.
Israel has responded by accusing Spain of waging “a continuous anti-Israel and antisemitic attack” and by barring entry to two members of Sánchez’s cabinet.
Felipe said Spain was proud of its Sephardic Jewish history and proud to have introduced the 2015 law that granted Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Jews who were expelled in 1492.
“That’s why we find it so hard to understand what the Israeli government is doing in the Gaza Strip and why it hurts us so much,” he said. “That is why we cry out, why we implore, and why we demand: stop this massacre now. No more deaths in the name of such an old and wise people who have suffered so greatly over the course of history.”
His references to the Sephardic legacy echoed those of the Spanish foreign ministry, which has previously stressed Spain’s Jewish past when confronted with what it has termed “false and slanderous” accusations of antisemitism from the Israeli government.
The king also said Spain had “forthrightly condemned the abominable terrorism of Hamas and, especially, the brutal slaughter of 7 October 2023”, and that Israel had a duty to adhere to international humanitarian law in Gaza and the West Bank.
He called for humanitarian aid to be let into Gaza, for a ceasefire, and for Hamas to immediately release the hostages “it so cruelly continues to hold”. Felipe said the international community needed to push for the two-state solution, adding that the growing diplomatic recognition of the state of Palestine should help to secure a “just and definitive” regional peace.
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The king’s speech came a day after Donald Trump used an inflammatory speech to the general assembly to castigate the UN for its “empty words” failure to end wars.
Felipe, in contrast, said the UN and its founding ideals remained relevant even in a world “that all too often pitches us into the vertigo of the precipice” and leads us to question the importance of multilateralism.
“To believe in the United Nations is to believe firmly in the universality of the principles and values collected together in its charter and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he said. “It is to avoid the temptation of adjusting them according to particular interests, or relativisms or exceptions. Because the dignity of the human being is non-negotiable.”
