Tony Blair: Bring in third party to end the war in Gaza

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for Gaza to be governed by a third party as a means of ending the conflict there, while expressing support for Israel’s war against Hezbollah.

When Blair was British prime minister during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, he backed Israel and resisted calls from within his own cabinet for an arms embargo. He has linked the current hostilities to Hezbollah’s violation of a 2006 U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution, which called for the group to withdraw from the border with Israel and disarm.

Blair was appointed Middle East peace envoy shortly after leaving office in 2007, representing the United States, the U.N., the European Union and Russia. He sought an agreement between Israel and Palestine — but made little headway, and resigned from the role in 2015.

“That’s how you bring to an end the Gaza conflict, and you bring to an end the Lebanon conflict by Hezbollah, doing what they were supposed to do those 18 years ago,” Blair told POLITICO’s Power Play podcast on Monday.

He said the besieged territory of Gaza should be governed by neither Israel nor Hamas, but rather by an unspecified third party as part of a peace deal to “begin a process of reconstruction.”

The Israeli military on Sunday bombed and destroyed Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut, killing the leader of the Iran-backed militant group and political movement, Hassan Nasrallah. This week Israel has launched a ground incursion in the south of Lebanon, its northern neighbor.

Iran on Tuesday conducted a direct missile attack on Israel, for which Israel has vowed to retaliate.

The major escalation followed Hezbollah’s launch of rocket attacks on Israel immediately after Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid, forcing about 80,000 Israelis to leave their homes in the north of the country. Israel retaliated with its own airstrikes, and the two have traded cross-border fire almost daily since then.

“Israel has decided that it’s going to take action to eliminate that threat from the north,” Blair said. “I could give you a long list of criticisms of the Israeli government that I’ve made over the years, but you have to understand that they came under attack on Oct. 7, and they came under attack on Oct. 8, and therefore, they’re going to defend themselves.”

“It is the way of Israel that if they come under attack, they fight back,” he said.