Spain will send two military aircraft to Beirut on Thursday to evacuate its citizens from Lebanon amid escalating violence in the region, Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles said on Wednesday.
In an interview with Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, Robles said that because of the tensions in the Middle East and Israel’s recent incursions into Lebanon, her ministry would send two army planes to evacuate Spaniards living in the country.
“The government is launching an operation tomorrow (Thursday) to send two planes to evacuate the personnel and, the following day, to send another plane because nationals from other countries have asked us for this possibility,” said Robles (PSOE/S&D).
According to sources in Madrid, some 380 of the 1,000 Spaniards living in the country have expressed their desire to leave Lebanon.
Spain is “prepared” to organise the evacuation operation because the progressive government of PSOE and the left-wing Sumar platform Sumar aim to ‘leave no one behind’ in the face of the serious situation in the Middle East, she added.
She said Spain is expected to send four military aircraft to Beirut in principle, probably of the A400M model. Madrid is considering sending a fourth military aircraft, if necessary, to evacuate citizens of other nationalities who want to leave Lebanon.
The success of the operation will depend on ‘the situation in the airspace’ in that country, Robles added. At the moment, the transit of flights has been suspended in some of them due to Israel’s recent bombing of Lebanon and Iran’s launching of missiles into the Hebrew state on Tuesday night, RTVE reported.
In addition to the nearly 1,000 Spanish civilians in southern Lebanon, 650 Spanish military personnel are stationed there as part of the UN peacekeeping mission (UNIFIL), which has a total of 10,500 troops.
(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.Euractiv.es)
Source: euractiv.com
