Macron says will do everything to avoid Mideast escalation
President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that France would help do everything to avoid an escalation in the Middle East after Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel.
Iran launched its first-ever direct assault on Israeli territory late on Saturday in retaliation for a deadly April 1 air strike on Tehran’s consulate building in Syria’s capital Damascus that was widely blamed on Israel.
“We will do everything to avoid a conflagration — that is to say an escalation,” Macron told the BFMTV news channel.
That would involve “trying to convince Israel not to respond by escalating,” he said.
“We need to be by Israel’s side to ensure its protection to the maximum, but also to call for a limit to avoid an escalation,” Macron said.
The French president also said French jets helped repel an Iranian violation of Jordan’s air space during the attack.
“For several years now we have had an air base in Jordan to fight beside our missions,” he said. “We made our planes take off and we intercepted what we had to intercept.” French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said he had asked the foreign ministry to summon the Iranian ambassador on Monday to express a “message of firmness”.
Israel has said Iran launched “over 350 threats, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, rockets and suicide drones” during the unprecedented onslaught. Nearly all the missiles and drones were intercepted by Israel and others, including the United States, Britain and France.
US forces destroyed “more than 80 one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicles (OWA UAV) and at least six ballistic missiles intended to strike Israel from Iran and Yemen,”
US Central Command said.
Meanwhile, Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid on Monday accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of leading to a “total loss of Israeli deterrence” in the wake of an unprecedented
Iranian attack.
Netanyahu, who returned to power in late 2022 at the helm of a coalition with far-right parties, has brought “heaps of destruction from Beeri to Kiryat Shmona”, Lapid said, calling for early elections. Beeri, a kibbutz community near the Gaza border, came under attack when Palestinian groups stormed the area on October 7, triggering the ongoing war, while the northern town of Kiryat Shmona has suffered during months of cross-border fire between Israeli forces and Lebanon’s groups.
Netanyahu’s cabinet has weighed Israel’s response to the Iranian attack, but the prime minister has not made any public comments.