BRUSSELS (REUTERS)
European Union foreign ministers reached an agreement on Monday on new sanctions targeting violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, as well as leading Hamas figures, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said.
The sanctions package, which targets three settlers and four settler organisations whose identities have yet to be publicly disclosed, had been blocked for months by the previous Hungarian government, which lost an election last month.
European governments have raised concern about a rise in reports of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. "It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery," Kallas said on X. "Extremisms and violence carry consequences," she added.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on X the EU had "chosen, in an arbitrary and political manner, to impose sanctions on Israeli citizens and entities because of their political views and without any basis."
"Equally outrageous is the unacceptable comparison the European Union has chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence," he added.
Senior Hamas official Basem Naim also criticised the move by EU ministers against his group, saying that the EU insists on what he described as political hypocrisy and racism.
"It equates a fascist executioner who boasts of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, a rogue state that violates every international law, with the victim who defends itself according to all laws and statutes," he told Reuters.