THE Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggest conducting international peace conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to build a viable Palestinian state in a meeting he had today with Israeli counterpart of Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Prospects for reviving peace talks that froze after the collapse of the last US-sponsored round in 2014 look even more remote as war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, which rules Gaza, has raged for nearly seven weeks.

Sanchez also met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and is expected to hold talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, later today before traveling to Egypt.

“Today, more than ever, we need to restore a serious and credible prospect for peace,” Sanchez said after talks with Netanyahu. “Without a political settlement, we are doomed to fall back into an endless cycle of violence.”

Sanchez said he and his colleagues, whom he did not name, proposed holding a peace conference with the parties as soon as possible. He said the European Union, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation endorsed the idea.

“It is in Israel’s interest to work for peace, and, today, peace means the establishment of a viable Palestinian state that [θα] includes the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, according to UN resolutions,” he said.

US officials have said the time is not right to make efforts to resume peace talks given the prolonged intransigence on both sides.

Sanchez co-chaired the meetings with his Belgian counterpart Alexandre de Croix — Spain holds the EU’s rotating presidency this semester and Belgium next semester.

De Croix told reporters that Israel and the Palestinians would have to show “political courage” in order to achieve peace.

Last week, Sanchez said a Union for the Mediterranean summit to be held in Barcelona on November 27-28 would be the “ideal place” to restart the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue as the two sides would “present themselves on equal terms” there. .

Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body created under interim peace accords in the 1990s, are members of the Mediterranean bloc along with neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria.

In 1991 Madrid had hosted a multilateral peace conference with the aim of resolving the conflict through negotiations based on a “territory for peace” formula, eventually leading to the Oslo Interim Accords on which the PA was founded.

But a series of negotiations that followed aimed at creating a Palestinian state on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war ran into immovable disputes over borders, Palestinian refugees, Israel’s continued expansion of settlements on occupied land and the status of Jerusalem.