PARIS, Jan 16: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday that Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas in Gaza would do nothing to improve its security and renewed a call for a ceasefire.

“This intervention is not reinforcing Israel’s security,” Sarkozy told foreign diplomats based in Paris. “The crisis in Gaza is a useless and bloody humanitarian tragedy. This tragedy must end.”

France has been pushing for Hamas and Israel to accept an Egyptian-led peace initiative, which would see Israel pull out of Gaza in exchange for a ceasefire and international measures to halt Palestinian arms smuggling.

Sarkozy called on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to take “risks” for peace and stressed that France was a friend of Israel as well as a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause.

There is, on the one hand, an “Israeli government that stands accused by the world at a time when Israel needs solidarity” and, on the other, “a divided Arab world whose moderate leaders have been weakened”, Sarkozy said.

Nuclear programme

Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme had no civilian purpose and was dragging it into a dangerous confrontation with the international community, said Sarkozy.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency underlines the rapid and worrying progress in Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, which everyone knows has no civilian end purpose,” he told foreign diplomats based in Paris.

“The moment is coming when Iran’s leaders will have to make a choice,” he warned, as part of an annual foreign policy address.

“Either they provoke a serious confrontation with the international community or, and this is what France wants, we come to a negotiated deal in these talks which have been going on for, mark this, five years.”

France, along with Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States, forms part of the six-nation contact group attempting to persuade Tehran to stand down its programme to enrich uranium in industrial quantities. Iran insists the programme is intended to supply a civilian nuclear power industry.

Under US and European pressure, the United Nations Security Council has imposed three rounds of targeted sanctions on Tehran’s Islamic government, but has so far provoked only defiance from the regime.—Agencies