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Blair questioned on work as Middle East envoy

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, June 1, IRNA – Former prime minister Tony Blair was being questioned for the second time by British MPs Monday over his role as envoy to the Middle East Quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia.

The all-party Foreign Affairs Select Committee was asking Blair on his assessment of recent developments, notably Israel’s latest slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and the election of a new US administration and Israeli government.

After giving evidence last June, the International Development Committee welcomed his plans to set up economic enclaves in the West Bank but expressed fear they may legitimize the Israeli occupation.

The committee warned that the projects must facilitate the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state, while criticising the continuing expansion of illegal Israeli settlement. The Quartet was also criticised for not pressing Israel to ease its inhuman siege of Gaza.

The former prime minister has come under scrutiny in Britain over the extent of the work he has been doing since being appointed as the Quartet’s envoy two years ago, while also taking several lucrative business posts, spending time on speaking tours of the US and writing his political memoirs.

The evidence session with Blair is the third held by the Foreign Affairs Committee as a follow-up to its inquiry in 2007 on the Middle East in terms of global security, in which it criticised the UK’s refusal to talk to Hamas as being “counterproductive” and concluded that the so-called Roadmap for Peace had “largely become an irrelevance.”