The European Union is dying in Gaza: The umpteenth EU refusal to sanction Israel fuels the killing fields in Palestine
Statement by the Steering Committee of the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2).
The Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2) Steering Committee most firmly condemns the recent EU’s 27 foreign ministers’ decision not to punish Israel for its actions in Gaza, while resolving to “keep a close watch” on the agreed flow of aid into the Strip while the carnage of civilians is allowed to continue in the occupied territories of Palestine. Once again, the EU’s refusal to sanction the Netanyahu government and suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is but a confirmation that Europe is dying in Gaza.
As an independent platform of civil society organizations committed to the right to health and the vision of Health for All, G2H2 called out the hypocrisy of the international community on Gaza and demanded an immediate ceasefire in December 2023. In May 2024, in a workshop dealing with the world in flames, G2H2 addressed the heating up of the geopolitical climate in the progressive normalization of limitless warfare in Gaza. Things have unspeakably worsened since then, as denial of survival for Palestinian people has become intentional, strategic, and part of Israel’s outspoken genocidal agenda. Indeed, the destruction of Gaza can no longer be dismissed as a humanitarian crisis, but a deliberate method of systemic biopolitical warfare.
“Only the Europeans still pretend to believe in the unlistenable refrain of Israel’s security needs, coupled with the worn-out fairy tale of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East” comments G2H2 co-chair Nicoletta Dentico. “Israel is a military colonial power driven by religious extremism and lacking any respect whatsoever for national sovereignty and the existence of other peoples: these very hours, the escalation of Netanyahu’s bombing in Syria – after Lebanon and Iran – is a glaring case in point”.
Israel’s closest EU allies – Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic – have opposed any of the ten sanction options, claiming that Israel has struck the humanitarian deal with the EU. In addition, Hungary continues to veto EU sanctions on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. In practice, only Spain has come out clearly for a suspension of the association agreement. While the reality in Gaza couldn’t be more brutal, from a massacre at a clinic to the relentless airstrikes on tents, the UN said about 875 Palestinians in the enclave had been killed in cold blood while waiting to receive aid since May, both at GHF distribution points and elsewhere.
“The EU keeps on failing in its legal and moral obligations to act”, claims Baba Aye, G2H2 co-chair. “The political cover-up and the material support the EU continues to provide to the occupying force of Israel makes it increasingly complicit in the genocide in light of the International Court of Justice’s ruling and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024”. Only last 16th July, judges at the ICC rejected Israel’s request to withdraw arrest warrants against its prime minister and former defense minister and to suspend the wider ICC investigation into alleged atrocity crimes in the Palestinian Territories.
G2H2 believes that the European leaders’ decision to greenlight the Israeli government’s slow-motioned genocide in Gaza once again, alongside its illegal occupation of the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), and its ferocious system of apartheid against Palestinians is a fatal blow to anything that Europe claims to historically represent.
Israel’s genocide in Palestine is killing the EU since its member states continue to grant political and military coverage to the Netanyahu’s government. By so doing, they are breaching their obligations to prevent and stop the genocide livestreamed daily under their eyes. They have no excuses. European governments can and must decide to change route and desert their complicity with the final stages of Netanyahu’s criminal plans. We, the people of the marches and the demonstrations for Gaza, the people of the petitions for ceasefires and the statements against warfare, demand immediate sanctioning initiatives against Israel through
- The suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement
- The embargo on sales and export of weapons to the Israeli government
- Sanctioning measures against EU corporate entities profiting from the economy of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank
As civil society organizations we shall not stay silent, while the people of Palestine are being exterminated, attacked in their homes, removed from their lands and lives, prevented from surviving.
Contact for enquiries: Baba Aye and Nicoletta Dentico, G2H2 Co-Presidents