The EU presents itself as a global champion of moral and legal leadership. Its refusal to hold Israel accountable or protect Palestinian lives tells a far different story.
People gather in front of the European Union Council building to stage a demonstration demanding the immediate suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and an urgent halt to all arms supplies, in Brussels, Belgium, on July 15, 2025.(Dursun Aydemir / Anadolu via Getty Images)
In July, when the European Union’s Foreign Policy chief Kaja Kallas announced that the 27-member bloc had secured an agreement with Israel to let in desperately needed humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, my friend Maram Humaid, like many others around her in Gaza, chose to believe it.
In her statement, Kallas said the deal would ensure the opening of vital border crossings and get food and aid trucks into Gaza. “We count on Israel to implement every measure agreed,” she said.
Maram, a journalist who has been covering the genocide for almost 22 months, thought that this would finally be a respite from the hell she’s been living in. But nothing came in, and the markets remained empty.
“I gave my friend 10 kilograms of flour,” Maram, a mother of two, told me. “I don’t regret it, but now I’m scared this state will continue. I ran out of rice a long time ago. There are no alternatives available, and I have to be mindful of every spoonful of flour or sugar I use.”
This was the first time since October 7, 2023, that Maram expressed these fears to me, despite the constant killing around her, several rounds of displacement, and the transformation of the Gaza that she knew and loved into a desperate wasteland. The fear of her children’s constant cry of hunger, the fear of not being able to feed them and herself. (She has since written about the starvation crisis for Al Jazeera.)
But to Kallas and her colleagues, casually throwing out empty rhetoric aimed at Palestinians has exactly served to be the defining feature of the EU’s attitude, despite the bloc’s own laws that oblige member states to act in the interests of human rights and against genocide. Far from taking a stance to hold Israel accountable for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip and the unprecedented murder rate of the civilian population, the EU has continued its “business as usual” approach, funneling public money to the Israeli army, government, and other entities, while continuing to import goods and resources from Israel, including gas.
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.
In June, the EU conducted its third report in 12 months about whether Israel was in compliance with the human rights clause in the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The irony is that it was Kallas herself who requested this review, over Israel’s blockade of aid deliveries in the Gaza Strip.
Slammed by Amnesty International for its “timid wording,” the review found “indications” that Israel is breaching its human rights obligations in the world’s first livestreamed genocide, but, characteristically, no action was taken.
It is worth noting that all 27 EU member states are signatories to the Genocide Convention, which stipulates a legal duty for parties to prevent and punish genocide. Furthermore, the International Court of Justice also makes it clear that third states are obligated to prevent trade and investment that help perpetuate unlawful occupation.
The proper response to the Israeli genocide should be an immediate arms embargo and suspension of trade deals. This requires a unanimous vote from all member states—an impossible doing, considering the unwavering support of Germany, never on the right side of history, and authoritarian Hungary. Germany, in particular, has been key to perpetuating the genocide; from October 7, 2023, to May 2025, it exported over half a billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel. (Last week, Germany halted the transfer of weapons “that could be used in Gaza,” though Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed, “We will continue to help this country to defend itself.”)
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Other actions, such as ending visa-free travel to Europe for Israelis, halting academic partnerships, or curbing access to its flagship research funding program, would require the agreement of a “qualified majority”—or 15 of the 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. But the meeting set to discuss such actions in July never came to fruition, with Kallas’s statement on July 10 acting as a fig leaf to the ongoing EU’s complicity in genocide.
Her statement less than two weeks later proved to be equally hollow; apparently, she told Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar that Israeli forces must stop killing aid seekers in Gaza.
“All options remain on the table if Israel doesn’t deliver its pledges,” she added, a cringeworthy attempt at an empty mic drop if there ever was one.
The EU is making a mockery of the international legal order it claims to uphold. For almost two years, the bloc has issued statements where it could not bring itself to mention Israel as responsible for the catastrophe in Gaza. Talks of “humanitarian crisis” or “unconditional ceasefire” without addressing the cause could be interpreted as cognitive dissonance, but the utter failure to address Israel’s conduct in Gaza is deliberate and by design.
“By prioritising political alliances and economic interests over their clear obligations under international law, European governments are not simply standing by—they are actively enabling and legitimising Israel’s criminal campaign,” the Euro-Mid Monitor rights group said in June.
This is part of a long-standing pattern. Since the EU has adopted Israel as, in the words of the bloc’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, “a member of the European Union without being a member of the institutions,” it has consistently failed to impose penalties, sanctions, or even suspend relations in response to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
The four major offensives on the Gaza Strip in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and 2021, which killed at least 4,000 Palestinians between them, did not stem trade relations at all. In 2024, with Israel’s extermination of the Gaza Strip in full swing, EU imports from Israel amounted to €15.9 billion, while its exports to Israel were worth €26.7 billion.
Israel can get away with its barbaric cruelty because it is the same form meted out historically by these European powers to their colonial subjects, from Belgium’s King Leopold against the Congolese people to Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia, to France’s atrocities in Algeria, and enabling the Rwandan genocide.
The bloc has been accused by former and current members of complicity with Israel. Teresa Ribera, the EU vice president, has criticized President Ursula von der Leyen’s inaction and failure to condemn the genocide.
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At the time of writing, at least 200 people—96 of them children—have starved to death in the Gaza Strip because of Israel and the EU’s shared values on humanism and civilization. One of the victims is a baby girl, Makka Al-Gharabli, with 40,000 other infants at risk of death because Israel continues to block baby formula and food, its impunity upheld by the Western powers.
There are no words that can adequately describe the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, under the watchful and complicit eyes of Western powers. The consequences will reverberate for decades and will forever be a huge stain on humanity. It feels almost impossible to describe what the people of Gaza, known for their warmth, generosity, and strong family ties, have been reduced to. Now their skeletal figures wait for death, in its myriad ways, whether by starvation, bombing, or the humiliating spectacle of costly and ineffectively parachuted aid falling directly on them, as was the case with paramedic Adi Nahed al-Quran. Or they get sniped and shot down in the dozens at the Israeli/US-run death points masquerading as aid sites. It seems surreal to watch Palestinians run through that gauntlet, armed with knives and other rudimentary weapons to protect themselves from others like them, where securing a bag of flour is akin to a small victory, staving off hunger for one more day.
By turning a blind eye to these war crimes, systemic human rights violations, and those perpetuating genocide, bodies like the EU have abandoned their own stated principles and enabled the destruction of an entire people.
The EU has failed to convince anyone that it can do anything but posture behind empty words, as opposed to undertaking moral, direct action to stop the massacre and forced starvation of Palestinians. But genocide has always been proven to be profitable, with governments, global technological corporations, including financial institutions and construction and energy firms, benefiting from not just the sale of arms but also the decades of gross human rights violations and international crimes committed against the Palestinians.
In the immortal words of Franz Fanon, European humanism is dehumanization, which revolves around profit and is grounded in the reduction of people to mere units in production.
“Europe, where they were never done talking with humanity, never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of humanity,” he wrote in the seminal The Wretched of the Earth. “Today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of mind.”
The genocide in Gaza has starkly revealed the hypocrisy of those powers that claim to uphold international law and a rules-based world order as pillars of their civilization. The brutality is there for all to see. Yet, in this modern age, not a single government has managed to halt the slaughter, hold Israel accountable, or ensure the delivery of essential, lifesaving aid to a besieged and devastated population. The European Union, in particular, stands as a symbol of this profound moral collapse. By the measure of its own principles and values, it has shown itself to be little more than an enabler of oppression, starvation, and mass killing.
Linah AlsaafinLinah Alsaafin is a Palestinian writer and journalist.