Italy will submit a proposal for a worldwide ceasefire to the United Nations before next year’s Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani said.
As a concept, a global truce during the Olympics dates to the ancient games in Greece, where warring factions agreed to put down their arms for the duration of the event, so that athletes could safely travel to and from ancient Olympia.
Calls by Olympics organisers and the UN for global ceasefires have not been heeded on the occasion of modern-era Games since 1896, including the 2024 Paris Olympics. The Milano Cortina Games open on February 6 and run to February 22.
“In view of the Milano Cortina Olympics, we are presenting a proposal for an Olympic truce for all wars, including Ukraine and the Middle East, to the United Nations,” Tajani said on Tuesday.
“We must be champions of peace,” he said on the sidelines of an international conference in Rome. “We support the US plan (to end the war in Gaza), and, as Pope Leo has said, we must never give up hoping for peace.”
The 20-point plan presented by United States President Donald Trump, on which Israel and Hamas began indirect talks on Monday, is seen as the most promising initiative to end a war that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attack on Israel that day killed 1,200 people.
Tuesday marked the second anniversary of the war on Gaza.
In response to Gaza’s devastation and humanitarian disaster wrought by Israel’s military campaign, a number of major Western countries, though not Italy, have formally recognised Palestinian statehood, endorsing longstanding Palestinian aspirations to an independent homeland on Israeli-occupied land.
In Ukraine, the pro-Western government has been battling a Russian invasion for more than three and a half years, in Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II and one that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
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