France, Spain, Italy to work on Mideast proposal
Source: Reuters
GIRONA, Spain, Nov 16 (Reuters) - The leaders of France, Spain and Italy have agreed to work on a joint proposal to try to resolve the Middle East conflict, French President Jacques Chirac said on Thursday. After a meeting on Franco-Spanish relations, Chirac said Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had put the Middle East on the agenda of bilateral talks being held in the Catalan town of Girona, near the French border. "When I arrived, Zapatero said to me 'we have the same vision of problems and concerns over the Middle East and particularly Palestine. We should take a common initiative'," Chirac told businessmen and professors. "Our three countries have the sensitivity, the same interests and the same morals and maybe we can play a part in working out a solution to the Palestinian problem and putting it into action," he said. Speaking in Rome, Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi said details of the initiative would be announced in the coming days. "I think the European countries present in the area, have an obligation to look for a way to get out of this situation and prepare -- to prepare -- a peace process," Prodi told reporters. He said the proposal would use "as its starting point" the presence of international forces in a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Last week, 19 Palestinian civilians were killed in an Israeli artillery barrage in the Gaza Strip and on Wednesday, rockets fired from Gaza killed one woman and wounded several other residents of an Israeli border town. (Additional reporting by Robin Pomeroy in Rome)
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