The presidents of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, visited this Friday the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where militants from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas raided last Saturday and massacred the population. “We were in Kfar Aza. One of the epicenters of the atrocities committed by Hamas last weekend,” Von der Leyen said in a message on the social network
Von der Leyen assured that “the horror of what happened here is indescribable,” and stated that “we are mourning with the families of the victims,” Efe reported.
The German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, has joined the solidarity visits that political leaders are making to Israel after the massacre caused by Hamas, leaving behind a wave of criticism for the way in which she has managed the evacuation of the national. “Hamas has committed terrible atrocities in recent days and we must call this terror by its name,” Baerbock declared at a press conference with his Israeli colleague, Eli Cohen. The minister expressed the solidarity of the German government, but also on the part of the German people with Israel and her people with the phrase “in these terrible days we are at your side and we feel with you. These days we are all Israelis.”
Baerbock’s presence in Israel was obligatory, although purely testimonial, because unlike the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on tour in the region, the minister’s political agenda only included, as far as is known, a meeting with Cohen in Netivot, near the border with the Gaza Strip. Cohen thanked Germany for the visit of support and solidarity with the State of Israel and assured that “peaceful coexistence with Hamas was impossible. “You can’t even call them animals,” she said.
Germany, which for historical reasons has made Israel’s security a state issue, has condemned without palliatives or shades of political color the Hamas massacre, among whose victims there are several Germans and among them the young Shani Louk. The case of this 22-year-old girl lying in the back of a Hamas vehicle, unconscious, bloodied and trampled, has gone around the world. She was presumed dead, but her mother, a native of Ravensburg, Germany, later found out that she was in critical condition in a hospital in Gaza. Baerbock will meet with that mother in a place that is kept secret.
Baerbock and Cohen met at the crisis center installed in Netivot and the press conference they offered took place in the presence of the victims’ families. At Cohen’s request, Baerbock later visited a house that had been hit by a Hamas rocket. Three people died in the home.
Baerbock’s trip to Israel occurs at a time of maximum tension in the area, but also in the midst of the criticism that his ministry is receiving for the delay and chaos with which the evacuation of its nationals has been carried out. Unlike other neighboring countries, and even Poland, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs only began the evacuation on Thursday, five days after the tragedy, and through a 48-hour operation put in the hands of Lufthansa.
“The undignified chaos surrounding the departure of Germans has already lasted too long,” declared the foreign policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Jürgen Hardt. The criticism, and it has been a barrage, began with the “externalization of the problem”, since Foreign Affairs, instead of resorting to military planes to speed up departures, engaged in a negotiation with Lufthansa.
The process to access these flights has been tortuous. The Lufthansa hotline for accessing the few outbound flights was constantly busy, leading, according to Hardt, to four-digit phone bills due to the hours of calls to or from Israel. The departure ticket had to be paid in advance with a credit card number provided over the phone, an impractical method for school classes, children and the elderly.
Hours before traveling to Israel, Baerbock declared on television that “there are always individual cases in which some people say, rightly, that we did not act quickly enough,” although “I know very well what the German embassy did about the land from day one”. She herself said she had been in contact with the Icelandic Minister of Foreign Affairs so that some German school classes could leave on flights via Iceland.
Baerbock of the Green party cited the difficult situation on the ground and the relatively large number of around 100,000 Germans and dual citizens in Israel. “It’s not like a normal situation, where everyone can go to the airport and then we’ll see who gets on which plane. The Israelis – rightly so – only allow people who have a plane ticket to enter the airport grounds. “he explained. “If everyone who wanted to leave the country had been asked to come to the airport, the result would have been absolute chaos,” he said.
Lufthansa will stop flying this Friday, but according to Baerbock, there are places available to leave Israel at all times, by bus to Jordan and on the boat to Cyprus.