• As Israeli ambassador speaks of fresh Palestine peace initiative

The chief of the international chemical weapons watchdog said on Friday that he has a team of experts ready and willing to travel to the site of this month’s deadly nerve gas incident in Syria if their safety can be assured.

“We are willing to go to Khan Sheikhoun and we have undertaken some actions,” Ahmet Uzumcu of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told a small group of reporters in The Hague.

Syrian ally Russia has called for an international investigation into the April 4 attack that killed nearly 90 people. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov this week expressed regret that the OPCW turned down the Syrian government’s offers to visit the site of the attack and investigate. Russia has rejected Western accusations that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government was behind the attack.

Uzumcu said that the area of the town of Khan Sheikhoun where the incident happened is controlled by opposition rebels, adding that the watchdog experts will “need to strike some deals with them,” such as a temporary ceasefire, to assure the team’s safety before it can deploy.

The OPCW has been extremely cautious about sending investigators to Syria since a team of its experts came under attack there in 2014. Uzumcu said the organization is in daily contact with U.N. authorities over the security situation in Syria.

The Syrian president has categorically rejected accusations that his forces were behind the attack, calling the incident an attempt to frame the Syrian government.

In an interview with Telesur network published Thursday, Assad said his government insists on an investigation.

“We and our Russian and Iranian allies are trying to persuade OPCW to send a team to investigate what happened, because if it doesn’t, the United States might repeat the same charade by fabricating the use of false chemical weapons in another place in Syria in order to justify military intervention,” he said.

The Trump administration fired 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in central Syria in the wake of the attack, marking the first time the U.S. has directly struck Assad’s forces during the country’s six-year civil war.

Uzumcu is not yet calling the April 4 incident a chemical weapons attack, but he has said that tests by his organization have established beyond doubt that sarin or a similar toxin was used.

Other nations, however, have already labelled it an attack and blamed the Syrian government.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said earlier this week that the attack “bears the signature” of Assad’s government and shows it was responsible. Ayrault said France reached the conclusion after comparing samples from a 2013 sarin attack in Syria that matched the new ones.

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.

Ayrault said French intelligence showed that only Syrian government forces could have launched such an attack — by a bomber taking off from the Shayrat air base, which was later targeted in a retaliatory U.S. missile strike after Washington also blamed Assad’s forces.

Uzumcu said his organization is not yet in a position to confirm the French findings.

The OPCW’s team is already gathering evidence from victims and survivors and testing samples outside Syria. Uzumcu said he expects an initial report to be issued in about 10 days. The initial OPCW investigation will not apportion blame — that is left to a separate investigative mechanism made up of OPCW and U.N. experts.

Uzumcu, who was speaking a day before the OPCW’s 20th anniversary, said his organization has received reports of 45 possible chemical weapons attacks in Syria since 2016.

He also warned of the possibility of foreigners fighting with extremist organizations such as the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq returning home and taking with them the “know-how” on the development and use of chemical weapons.

In the meantime, Israel is pressing for a fresh Middle East peace initiative involving Arab states, Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, told a meeting at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London as pro-Palestinian activists mounted a vocal protest outside.

Regev said Israel “wants to see larger and greater involvement from the Arab world” in new peace negotiations. Pragmatic Sunni Arab states saw a “convergence of interest” with Israel in relation to Iran and had “significant cards to play”, he added. He said that Israel had approached Donald Trump’s administration about “trying to get the peace process back on track”.

Protesters’ chants were clearly audible from the first-floor seminar room at the London university college where Regev engaged in an hour-long question-and-answer session with an audience of about 60 people. There was heavy Israeli security inside, while police officers monitored the protest outside.

For the most part, Regev restated familiar Israeli government positions on settlements, barriers and checkpoints and the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Eric Heinze of Queen Mary University chaired the meeting and opened by saying that many people considered Regev a war criminal for his defence of Israeli actions in Gaza when he was the government spokesperson. In reply, Regev said he had done his job, “to represent the democratically elected government of Israel” with pride.

Later he said: “Israel cherishes freedom of expression and freedom of speech. To the people outside, I would say this: they claim to be the friends of the Palestinians. But by supporting a hardline, maximalist Palestinian position, are they friends of the Palestinian people? They are chanting, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – meaning Israel has no right to exist. I’d like to tell them that Israel is not going away.”

Several hundred pro-Palestinian and and a smaller number of pro-Israel activists gathered outside Soas before the event, waving rival flags and playing rival music through loudspeakers.

One protester, Nadia, said she “fundamentally disagreed” with supporters of Israel being allowed to display the country’s flag, which she described as “symbol of hatred”. She said: “We should not be giving platforms to hate speech. Freedom of speech is bullshit. Democratic liberal western values are being used to excuse colonialism.”

Abc with additional report from Guardian