BRUSSELS: EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas on Tuesday said the bloc was leaving the door open to action against Israel over the war in Gaza if the humanitarian situation does not improve.
Kallas has put forward 10 potential options after Israel was found to have breached a cooperation deal between the two sides on human rights grounds.
The measures range from suspending the entire accord or curbing trade ties to sanctioning Israeli ministers, imposing an arms embargo and halting visa-free travel.
Despite growing anger over the devastation in Gaza, EU states remain divided over how to tackle Israel and there was no critical mass for taking any of the moves at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
“We will keep these options on the table and stand ready to act if Israel does not live up to its pledges,” Kallas told journalists.
“The aim is not to punish Israel. The aim is to really improve the situation in Gaza.”
That comes after Kallas on Thursday announced a deal with Israel to open more entry points and allow in more food.
Gaza’s two million residents face dire humanitarian conditions as Israel has severely limited aid during its war with Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“We see some positive signs when it comes to opening border crossings, we see some positive signs of them reconstructing the electricity lines, providing water, also more trucks of humanitarian aid coming in,” Kallas said Monday.
But she said the situation in Gaza remained “catastrophic.”
“Of course, we need to see more in order to see real improvement for the people on the ground,” she said.
Irish minister Thomas Byrne, whose country has been one of the toughest in the EU on Israel, said Kallas had committed to updating member states every two weeks on the progress of humanitarian access to Gaza.
“So far, we haven’t really seen the implementation of it, maybe some very small actions, but there’s still slaughter going on,” he said.
“So we need to see action and we need to use our leverage.”
While the EU appears unable to take further moves against Israel, just getting to this stage has been a considerable step.
The bloc only agreed to review the cooperation deal after Israel relaunched military operations in Gaza following the collapse of a ceasefire in March.
Until then, deep divisions between countries backing Israel and those more favorable to the Palestinians had hamstrung any move.
But the splits within the bloc mean that it has struggled to have a major impact on the war in Gaza and Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar had predicted confidently that the bloc wouldn’t take any further action on Monday.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which led to 1,219 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Of 251 people taken hostage by Hamas, 49 are still held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry says that at least 58,386 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory campaign. The UN considers those figures reliable.
Israel and Hamas have been in indirect talks for two weeks over a new ceasefire deal, but talks appear to be deadlocked.