China has called on the United Nations Security Council to take “urgent actions” to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East as Israel launched fresh air strikes in Lebanon, Reuters reports.

China’s permanent representative to the UN, Fu Cong, said during a UNSC briefing on Wednesday, that it needed to make clear and unequivocal demands to stop the cycle of violence over the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

“The Security Council bears the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” the official Xinhua news agency reported Fu as saying, noting that all parties concerned “must return to the track of political and diplomatic solutions”.

Warning that the current situation is “hanging by a thread”, Xinhua cited Fu as saying that any “passive procrastination would be irresponsible, and any rhetoric of condoning further military adventurism would send a wrong message”.

Fu said the spreading Middle East conflict had already caused an unprecedented humanitarian disaster, with Gaza having become a “hell on earth”, and over 1.2 million people displaced in Lebanon.