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BRUSSELS: European Union leaders are seeking a more active role in Gaza and the occupied West Bank after being sidelined from the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
At a summit Thursday in Brussels largely focused on Ukraine and Russia, EU heads of state discussed the shaky ceasefire in Gaza and pledged EU support for stability in the war-torn coastal enclave. The EU has been the biggest provider of aid to the Palestinians and is Israel’s top trading partner.
“It is important that Europe not only watches but plays an active role,” said Luc Frieden, the prime minister of Luxembourg, as he headed into the meeting. “Gaza is not over; peace is not yet permanent,” he said.
Outrage over the war in Gaza has riven the 27-nation bloc and pushed relations between Israel and the EU to a historic low.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in September plans to seek sanctions and a partial trade suspension against Israel, aimed to pressure it to reach a peace deal in Gaza.
Momentum driving the measures seemed to falter with the ceasefire deal mediated by US President Donald Trump, with some European leaders calling for them to be scrapped.
But leaders from Ireland to the Netherlands say that with violence continuing to flare up in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, keeping on the table sanctions of Israeli cabinet ministers and settlements and the partial suspension of a trade deal gives the EU leverage on Israel to curtail military action.
In the run-up to the ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month that “Europe has essentially become irrelevant and displayed enormous weakness.”
The ceasefire deal came about with no visible input from the EU, and European leaders have since scrambled to join the diplomacy effort currently reshaping Gaza.
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has said the EU should play a role in Gaza and not just pay to support stability and eventually reconstruction.
The EU has provided key support for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the occupied West Bank.
At the summit’s conclusion, EU leaders issued a pledge to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, potentially via a maritime route from Cyprus. They also suggested that a West Bank police support program could be extended to Gaza to bolster the stabilization force called for in the current 20-point ceasefire plan.
The EU has sought membership in the plan’s “Board of Peace” transitional oversight body, Dubravka Šuica, European Commissioner for the Mediterranean, said this week.
At least two EU countries, Denmark and Germany, are participating in the new US-led stabilization effort overseeing and implementing the Gaza ceasefire. Flags of those two nations have been raised at the Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel.
The European Border Assistance Mission in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border, began in 2005. In January, it deployed 20 security border police experts from Italy, Spain and France.
During the February-March ceasefire, the mission helped 4,176 individuals leave the Gaza Strip, including 1,683 medical patients. Those efforts were paused when fighting resumed. Outside of the EU, individual nations have acted to pressure Israel on their own as protests have rocked cities from Barcelona to Oslo. Many have recognized a Palestinian state. Spain has ratcheted up its opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the war a “genocide” when he announced in September plans to formalize an arms embargo and block Israel-bound fuel deliveries from passing through Spanish ports. In August, Slovenia issued an arms embargo in what it said was a first for a EU member country.
Some national broadcasters have sought to exclude Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. Member broadcasters will vote in November on whether Israel can participate in the musical extravaganza next year, as calls have mounted for the country to be excluded over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

PARIS: French magistrates this summer issued a new arrest warrant against ousted Syrian president Bashar Assad over deadly chemical attacks in 2013, a judicial source said on Thursday.
This means France has now put out three separate arrest warrants against the former dictator exiled in Russia, who ruled Syria from 2000 until he was toppled last year after more than 14 years of devastating civil war.
French investigators have since 2021 been looking into suspected Syrian government chemical attacks on Adra and Douma outside Damascus on August 4-5, 2013, and in Eastern Ghouta on August 21.
Around 450 people were hurt in the first attack, while American intelligence says over 1,000 were killed with sarin nerve gas in East Ghouta, a suburb of Syrian capital Damascus.
Magistrates had in 2023 issued an arrest warrant in the chemical attacks case while Assad was still president, but the country’s highest court in July annulled it over it being ordered while his presidential immunity still applied.

This new arrest warrant issued after his fall from power replaces the previous one. It accuses him of complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes in the chemical attack case.
Also in the same case, magistrates issued a warrant against Talal Makhlouf, the former commander of the Syrian Republican Guard’s 105th Brigade, the judicial source said.
Assad and his family fled to Russia, according to Russian authorities, after Islamist-led fighters seized power on December 8.
Two other French warrants are already out for Assad’s arrest.
One was issued in January for suspected complicity in war crimes for a bombing in the Syrian city of Daraa in 2017 whose victims included a French-Syrian civilian.
And another was issued in August over the bombardment of a press center in the rebel-held city in 2012 that killed two journalists.
Marie Colvin, 56, an American working for The Sunday Times of Britain, and French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, were killed on February 22, 2012 by the explosion in the eastern city of Homs, which is being investigated by the French judiciary as a potential crime against humanity as well as a war crime.
Ahead of Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa visiting Russia last week, a Syrian government official told AFP that the new president would ask President Vladimir Putin to hand over Assad.
But after the meeting neither Sharaa nor Putin publicly mentioned extraditing Assad, who Russia says it is protecting on “humanitarian grounds.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed early last week that the ousted Syrian leader was still living in Moscow.
The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 with Assad’s brutal repression of anti-government protests, killed over half a million people.
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