The United Nations rights chief has called for cool heads to prevail in the Middle East and urged the warring sides to pull back and “give peace a chance”, AFP reports.

The crisis sparked in the Middle East a week ago by the barrage of US and Israeli strikes on Iran “has been spreading like wildfire”, Volker Turk told reporters in Geneva.

“The world urgently needs to see steps to contain and extinguish this blaze,” he said, lamenting that “instead, we are only seeing more inflammatory, bellicose rhetoric, more bombings, more destruction, killings, and escalation that fuels it further”.

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