(August 4, 2025)
Italy, Spain, and Hungary have been in favor of mandatory chat scanning from the start. France could tip the balance since blocking the plan requires four countries representing at least 35 percent of the EU’s population. Paris has moved from tentative support to saying it could “basically support the proposal.”
(September 30, 2025)
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni later reiterated her call for flotilla members to immediately stop their mission, warning that a confrontation with Israel could derail diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
„Many would be happy to disrupt„ a peace plan pushed by US President Donald Trump, Meloni said in a statement. „I fear that the flotilla‘s attempt to breach the Israeli naval blockade could provide a pretext for this.“
(August 11, 2025)
The EU presents itself as a global champion of moral and legal leadership, grounded in the principles of human rights, international law, democracy, and humanitarianism. Yet its failure to uphold these values in the case of Palestine severely undermines its credibility. As Israel’s largest trading partner and second-largest arms supplier, the EU possesses considerable leverage; its refusal to use this influence to hold Israel accountable or protect Palestinian lives signals not powerlessness but a conscious choice of complicity. Moreover, given its member states’ historical entanglement in the colonial partitioning of the Middle East, the EU bears a deeper responsibility to act with justice. Its failure to do so today echoes the very dynamics of domination and double standards it claims to have left behind.
(July 15, 2025)
Reacting to the EU’s decision not to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, Agnès Callamard Amnesty International’s Secretary General said:
“The EU’s refusal to suspend its agreement with Israel is a cruel and unlawful betrayal – of the European project and vision, predicated on upholding international law and fighting authoritarian practices, of the European Union’s own rules and of the human rights of Palestinians.
This will be remembered as one of the most disgraceful moments in the EU’s history.
(August 4, 2025)
Gathered online for their regular Mashreq/Maghreb Working Party and despite mounting pressure on Israel over the hunger crisis in Gaza, the 27 EU diplomats still couldn’t reach any qualified majority on a European Commission proposal to cut Israel from partial access to the EU‘s €95 billion Horizon Europe research fund.
“The situation has not changed,” one EU diplomat said, referring to a formal meeting of EU ambassadors last week which also failed to agree to the Commission’s proposal. The diplomat said the issue was now in the hands of the EU’s foreign affairs ministers, who will meet informally on 29 August.