EU denounces Israel, but still refuses to use the leverage it keeps talking about

Human cost first, policy later

When Irish MEP Barry Andrews visited Beirut last month, the destruction was not an abstract policy issue, it was people sleeping in converted schools after fleeing Israeli airstrikes and evacuation orders in southern Lebanon.

The conditions, he said, were worse than during Israel’s last incursion in 2024. “There are dirty mattresses, dirty blankets, [people] are getting infections, they are getting rashes,” he recalled, describing a grim scene made even harder by steep cuts to aid budgets.

Andrews, who chairs the European parliament’s development committee, was in Lebanon two weeks after Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, fired rockets into Israel, prompting major retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces.

Calls for sanctions, and not just because the optics are bad

Back in Europe, Andrews was among the first lawmakers to argue that the EU should bring back sanctions on Israel.

His case is not limited to the fighting in Lebanon. He wants Brussels to respond to state-backed settler violence in the West Bank, attacks on health workers in Gaza, and Israel’s possible reinstatement of the death penalty against Palestinians after a Knesset vote this week.

The trouble, as ever, is that the EU says a lot and then largely stops there. One month into the Iran war, the bloc, one of Israel’s closest allies and biggest economic partners, has not moved beyond statements in its effort to influence Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Andrews is unimpressed by that approach. “When the European Union takes a principled stand on these issues the Israelis do pay attention,” he said.

The leverage exists, but the appetite does not

Brussels does have tools. The centrepiece is the EU’s association agreement with Israel, a trade and cooperation deal that supports a €68bn (£59bn) commercial relationship and covers areas including energy and scientific research.

Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, the EU’s representative to the Palestinian territories until 2023, argues that the bloc should suspend the agreement, end all military support and stop trade with illegal settlements.

Without concrete action to defend international law in Gaza and the West Bank, he warned, the EU’s standing “will be further severely affected”.

“The usual words of concern and condemnation are not enough,” he said. “They are meaningless when not followed by effective measures to hold Israel to account.”

Andrews used blunter language, calling the EU response to the war with Iran and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon “weak and pathetic”. In his view, “time and time again, Israel has been given a permission slip for endless war crimes.”

Death penalty vote draws condemnation

The European Commission said this week that the Knesset vote on the death penalty was “very concerning” and “a clear step backwards”. The proposal would apply to Palestinians, not Jewish extremists, which is the kind of detail that tends to matter in human rights debates, even if it has a habit of being ignored.

The Council of Europe, which has signed 28 treaties with Israel, went further, calling the vote “a legal anachronism incompatible with contemporary human rights standards”.

A deadly few weeks, and no shortage of warnings

Western leaders have urged Israel not to launch a ground offensive in Lebanon, while also condemning Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.

The toll in Lebanon has been heavy. Over the past four weeks, more than 1,240 people have been killed, including at least 124 children, and more than 1.1 million people have been forced from their homes.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza keeps rising out of the headlines. At least 673 people have been killed there since the October ceasefire, bringing the total in the devastated territory to 72,260.

A familiar EU habit: concern first, action later, maybe

The bloc’s reluctance to punish Israel is not new.

Last September, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed sanctions, citing the “manmade famine” in Gaza and “a clear attempt to undermine the two-state solution” through settlement plans in the West Bank. The German conservative has previously been accused of being too willing to defend Israel without much in the way of public questioning.

Her move came after intense public anger over the devastation in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of genocide, and after a large majority of EU member states backed a review of the association agreement.

But the sanctions package never got majority support in the EU council of ministers. Then momentum faded again when Donald Trump announced his Gaza ceasefire plan in October.

Divided capitals, familiar vetoes

EU governments remain troubled by the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the relentless violence in the West Bank, which the Israeli state has been accused of enabling.

One senior EU diplomat said in mid-March that “there may come a point when we need to increase the pressure on Israel again”, describing the situation in Gaza and the West Bank as “highly problematic”.

Diplomats said the EU’s early caution over the wider war was partly because Israel and the US targeted Iran, a regime widely condemned in Europe for massacring its own people and helping to spread instability in the Middle East and Ukraine through drone supplies to Russia.

Another EU diplomat, who supported the 2025 review of the association agreement, said the bloc also needs to stay engaged with Israeli society. That included listening to an open letter from 600 Israeli security officials last August calling for an end to the war in Gaza, just as Israel was weighing whether to intensify the campaign.

“These are not peaceniks,” the diplomat said. “These are people from the Israeli security establishment, who are very much concerned about the policies of their own government. The EU has to relate to that in one way or another.”

Europe’s split screen

Part of the reason Brussels struggles to act is that member states are divided.

Ireland, Spain and Slovenia have been among the strongest defenders of the Palestinian cause. Germany and Austria, because of their history, have been far more hesitant to criticise Israel. Hungary adds its own complications, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán serving as Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideological ally and helping to block measures that would otherwise have been uncontroversial, including sanctions on extremist settlers in the West Bank.

A Commission spokesperson said this week that diplomatic contact with Israel was still ongoing, because, apparently, that is what happens when the EU and one of its regular partners do not see things the same way.

Kühn von Burgsdorff argues that Brussels should stop drifting and choose a more forceful line.

“How can it serve Europe to be seen as a sidekick of an erratic, unreliable and apparently megalomaniac US president, or of a warmongering, annexationist Israeli prime minister,” he said. “That cannot be in Europe’s interest, because it comes at the expense of relations with other parts of the world.”