EU leaders agree to disagree on Gaza

Officials had prepared ideas for declarations that European Union leaders could make about the war between Israel and Hamas in advance of this week’s summit in Brussels, but in the end these drafts never saw the light of day.

Negotiators decided not to even try to agree to include a statement about the Middle East in the summit conclusions. Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Malta had called for the EU to demand a ceasefire in advance of the summit but it was evident that a group of countries strongly disagreed.

“You are aware of Germany’s position, and the position of a number of other countries, who are convinced that we need to take decisions that bear in mind the different challenges that for example, Israel faces,” German chancellor Olaf Scholz told journalists when asked about the issue. He reminded reporters that Hamas was still firing rockets.

Yet one senior official said it was clear that the majority in the EU had shifted towards supporting a ceasefire. This was reflected in the vote in the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week which showed 17 out of 27 EU member states voted in favour of a ceasefire, compared to two countries against.

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“We can see the evolution,” the senior official said, describing a shift in opinion since October when the EU leaders last discussed the issue. “There is broader support for exercising more pressure on Israel to be more in line with international law, including the principle of proportionality.”

However an attempt to reconcile the polarised views on the issue in the EU by pushing for a joint statement “would have been divisive”, the official said.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said this would have locked the leaders into discussions for “many, many hours” over whether they could use the words “rolling truces” or “on and off pauses”. He was among several leaders with the opinion that if no ceasefire could be called for it was better to say nothing at all.

In lieu of negotiations to agree on a joint statement, the EU leaders used their time together to have a discussion about what they did agree on. This turned out to be quite a lot.

The EU leaders believe Israel should follow international law. They believe it has the right to defend itself against Hamas. They believe that humanitarian aid to Gaza needs to be hugely increased. They don’t believe that Israel should occupy the strip after the war.

The issue of a ceasefire is “basically the only issue where we differ”, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte told journalists.

“The Europeans, it’s no secret, they do not have a unanimous view on what is happening in the region, but I believe that we have objectives which are unanimous,” French president Emmanuel Macron said.

Leaders were particularly emphatic that the two-state solution now must become a reality. They called for concrete moves towards founding a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.

Mr Varadkar said the EU had to “really pressurise Israel and say that their failure to allow the Palestinians to have their own state is going to affect the relationship between Israel and EU into the future – it’s not going to be back to the way it was before this war”.

The Israelis “need to find a way, together with Palestinians, to create a separate state. Because we have now seen that putting this problem behind a fence is not working,” Mr Rutte told reporters.

Mr Scholz concurred. “A two-state solution is the only path allowing Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace with each other.”

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