Borrell: Israel siege ‘illegal’, cutting aid to Gaza would be gift to Hamas

A closed meeting of MEPs from the foreign affairs committee at the European Parliament was convened on Tuesday, hosting Israel’s ambassador to the European Union.

German MEP David McAllister (EPP), chair of the foreign affairs committee, said the extraordinary meeting included representatives of the European External Action Service and the Commission DG.

The committee “expressed full solidarity with Israel in times of these brutal, outrageous terrorist attacks”, McAllister said. “We showed solidarity with Israel and expressed our condolences to all the Israeli people who are mourning the loss of their beloved. And, we’ve also underlined that Israel has a right to self-defence, which is underlined by international law.”

McAllister also said that MEPs discussed EU policy with respect to the funding of the Palestinian authorities.

The PLA is governed by the ruling party Fatah from the West Bank. But the Gaza strip, which is under occupation by the Israeli government and cut off from Egypt and Israel, is under the sway of the Hamas militia, the Islamic resistance movement.

However, Israel’s siege of Gaza was yesterday also deemed illegal by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who insisted that European aid to Palestine will keep flowing.

“Israel has a right to self-defence, but it has to be done within international law... cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people is against international law,” Borell said in a press conference from Oman, where he met foreign ministers. “The Palestinian people are also suffering,” he added.

Borrell’s words were the first direct EU criticism of Israel’s reaction to Saturday’s massacre of about 1,000 Israelis by Hamas.

Israeli forces have now killed some 830 Palestinians in air raids, while the UN relief agency in Gaza, UNWRA, said that with food-distribution centres closed, around 500,000 people didn’t get food rations this week.

Schools are now closed because some 190,000 people are using them as bomb shelters, and drinking water is being delivered by trucks for now, UNWRA said.

Borrell’s condemnation of Israel’s behaviour came three days after EU rhetoric from both the Commission and the Parliament that brought out the “utterly inhuman” and “barbarous” nature of Hamas’s atrocities.

“Israel’s actions are a direct consequence of what Hamas did,” Borrell’s spokesman had said in Brussels earlier the same day.

Yet Borrell’s colleague, Hungarian commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, gave the impression that Europe would follow with collective punishment for Palestinians, by warning that all EU aid to Palestine would be frozen. It turned out that Várhelyi had not consulted anyone before tweeting the threat, the European Commission confirmed on Tuesday.

Stopping aid to ordinary Palestinians would be “the best present we could give to Hamas and it would jeopardise our interests and partnerships in the Arab world,” Borrell said.

The EU is the most generous donor to Palestine, and UNRWA needs international contributions to continue its life-saving service provision in Gaza and throughout the region.

Borrell said that “95 percent” of EU ministers took the same line in the Muscat talks, while “two or three” of the EU-27 did want aid cuts.

The EU commission spent €30m on water-sanitation facilities in Gaza last year for instance, as part of a wider €296m aid budget for Palestine including €97m for UNWRA.

The European Parliament oversees EU spending via its budgetary-control committee. Its 2024 EU-budget rapporteur, Romanian centre-right MEP Siegfried Muresan, said he would consider freezing non-essential aid money if need be. “We want to make sure that, beyond UNRWA, the EU budget does not get to any organisations which has any ties, any links to Hamas,” he said.

“If there is anything from the EU budget that we feel has to be put in question or frozen or put in reserve as a consequence of the start of this war we are going to propose a respective amendment,” Muresan said. “On our end, it’s very hard to check for that and no funding on our end has been specifically earmarked for Gaza,” an EU parliament source also said.