Spain, Italy, France unveil Mid-East peace plan

Spain, Italy and France will launch a new Middle East peace plan, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said on Thursday, the BBC reported. .

"Peace between Israel and the Palestinians means to a large extent peace on the international scene," Zapatero said after talks with visiting French President Jacques Chirac.

He said the plan would be presented at an EU summit in December.

"We want to launch a joint initiative on the Middle East situation and push it through at European Union level, preferably with Germany and Britain,” the Spanish Prime Minister said. 

"We cannot remain impassive in the face of the horror that continues to unfold before our eyes… Violence has reached a level of deterioration that requires determined, urgent action by the international community.”

The proposal would include an immediate ceasefire in the occupied Palestinian territories, an exchange of prisoners, an international peace conference on Middle East peace, and the resumption of peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The three countries are also calling for the formation of a national unity Palestinian government, and the dispatch of a fact-finding mission to the region, Zapatero said. 

For his part, Chirac said the European Union must act in the face of "the increasingly dramatic situation in the Middle East and in Palestine in particular."

"We are going to act jointly with the Spanish and Italian governments, with the co-operation of the EU... to try to initiate the indispensable moral and political reforms in the Middle East," he added.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, the Palestinians or the United States.

The two European leaders spoke amid fresh violence in the region.

Israel’s air force pounded Gaza overnight hours after the Israeli government vowed to expand its military operations in the coastal strip following a wave of Palestinian rocket attacks that killed an Israeli woman in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. 

Israel often claims that the threat from Palestinian rocket attacks is the main reason for its bloody attacks in Gaza, where more than 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian fighters in June. 

More than 60% of Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians and at least 20% minors, according to a recent report by the Physicians for Human Rights group.

The violence comes amid Palestinian political wrangling over the formation of a national unity government.

President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction and the ruling Hamas party have been deadlocked for months over the creation of a unity administration.

The U.S. and EU imposed crippling sanctions on the Palestinian government after Hamas took office in March in an effort to pressure the governing party to recognize Israel, give up anti-Israel attacks and accept past peace deals with the Jewish state.

The Western aid embargo causes widespread hardship in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.