The Iran war risks distracting the EU from “intensifying” harm in Gaza and West Bank, on top of Europe’s long-standing political divisions on Israel.

The EU Parliament should — at the least — have a plenary debate on Gaza to hold Israel to account despite the Iran crisis, the leftwing, centre-left, Green, and liberal groups told press in Brussels on Wednesday (4 March).

“While the issue has fallen off the agenda, the actions of the Israeli government are becoming more extreme,” said Irish leftwing MEP Lynn Boylan.

Israel had used the Iran war as “cover” to block most aid to Gaza since the Iran attack began on 28 February, she said.

Israel was guilty of “multiple breaches of international humanitarian law” in Gaza, added Irish liberal MEP Barry Andrews.

Their concerns were corroborated by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and London-based Amnesty groups.

The Iran war meant “the risk of the EU losing focus on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is very clear, very palpable,” HRW’s Claudio Francavilla told EUobserver.

At the same time, “Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza has continued. They also continued their annexation policy in the West Bank”, he said.

Amnesty’s Eve Geddy said: “Lack of global condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Iran has led to an intensification of its genocide and apartheid against Palestinians”.

Marina Miron, a defence expert from King’s College London in the UK, also said: “Right now, the immediate [EU] attention has, of course, shifted to Iran”.

And the shift could last a long time if the Iran war goes badly for Israel and the US, she said.

“This isn’t going to be a Maduro scenario, because Iran isn’t Venezuela and Iran can do this [wage war] for a long time,” said Miron, referring to the US overnight abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January.

“The beheading of the Iranian regime has not crippled the system,” she said.

“For Iran, the best approach is the long war, to drag this out, make this as painful and costly for the US and Israel as it can,” Miron added.

Unsanitary living conditions spreading disease in Gaza, the UN said (Source: UNRWA).

Gaza deaths rising

The situation in Gaza was already dire on the eve of the Iran war, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“Airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire continued across the Gaza Strip” killing seven people last week, OCHA said, on top of 611 killed since a US-declared ceasefire in October 2025.

Just 289 out of 20,000 Gaza patients who needed medical evacuation had gotten out via the EU-monitored Rafah crossing to Egypt before Israel shut it on Saturday.

The UN also spoke of “malnourished children” and spread of “ectoparasitic skin infections (including scabies and head lice) and waterborne diseases” in refugee camps, due to lack of water and soap.

And in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers and settlers had killed “1,055 Palestinians — at least 230 of them children,” since the Gaza war in 2023, the UN said, including the first fatality of settler violence this year, on 18 February.

“The EU must demand that Israel reopens the Rafah crossing to allow the flow of food, medical supplies, and medical evacuations,” said Amnesty’s Geddy.

The EU Parliament has no foreign policy powers, but when the EU Commission president proposed sanctions against Israel last September it “had a real impact on Israeli” behaviour, said Andrews, the MEP.

The sanctions have not been discussed in the EU Council since the 2025 Gaza ceasefire, diplomats said.

Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, and Spain were the most critical of Israel before the Iran crisis, but Germany’s centre-right government had resumed normal ties in the wake of the ceasefire.

“Don’t forget, the Germans are the second-largest provider of arms to an army [Israel’s] whose government stands accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice [in The Hague],” said HRW’s Francavilla.

EU coordinator for fighting antisemitism Katharina von Schnurbein (Source: EU Commission).

EU political divide

And conservatives in the EU Parliament have blocked not just calls for a plenary debate on Gaza so far this year, but also her appeals to hold a minute’s silence in sympathy with Palestinian victims, said Spanish centre-left MEP Ana Miranda Paz on Wednesday.

Miranda Paz referred to her Israel-critical bloc in the EU assembly, which represented 308 out of 720 seats, as “the progressive groups”.

For its part, Israel has accused almost all its EU critics of antisemitism.

Meanwhile, genuine antisemitic attacks and hate speech have spiked in Europe since the Gaza war began.

And Middle East geopolitics aside, the human tragedies involved have “divided a lot of people” also on a personal level inside EU institutions, Portuguese Green MEP Catarina Vieira told EUobserver.

Some EU officials have baked cakes to sell for Gaza charities, for instance, but the EU Commission coordinator on combatting antisemitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, said this caused “ambient antisemitism”.

“I did not say that bake sales as such were antisemitic. What I described was the challenge of this ambience,” said von Schnurbein in a parliament hearing on 2 February, clarifying her leaked remarks to EU ambassadors in Israel last year.

“When you come into the office in the morning, and time and again you pass by a bake sale, and maybe you have someone who was killed in the Nova concert, it has an impact,” von Schnurbein told the MEPs, referring to a music festival in Israel attacked by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023.

Speaking at that same hearing on 2 February, the German centre-right MEP who chaired parliament’s delegation to Israel, Hildegard Bentele, also blamed Arab immigrants for “imported antisemitism” in the EU and “foreign influence, through [Qatari-based broadcaster] Al Jazeera” for anti-Israel criticism that crossed the line into Jew-hatred.

But for her part, Vieira, who came from Madeira, an “ultra-peripheral” EU island in the Atlantic Ocean with almost no immigration and no historical Middle East ties, said people back home had voiced sympathy with Palestinians simply because their suffering had “touched a chord”.

“The vast majority of people have done this with respect and without blaming all Jewish people [for Israel’s actions] and I hope that’s always the way it goes,” Vieira said.