BRUSSELS, May 11 (Reuters) – European Union foreign ministers reached an agreement on Monday on new sanctions targeting violent Israeli settlers in \u200cthe occupied West Bank, as well as leading Hamas figures, EU \u200cforeign policy chief Kaja Kallas said.<\/p>\n
The sanctions package, which targets three settlers and four settler organisations \u200bwhose identities have yet to be publicly disclosed, had been blocked for months by the previous Hungarian government, which lost an election last month.<\/p>\n
European governments have raised concern about a rise in reports of settler violence against Palestinians \u200cin the West Bank.<\/p>\n
“It was \u2060high time we move from deadlock to delivery,” Kallas said on X. “Extremisms and violence carry consequences,” she added.<\/p>\n
Israeli Foreign \u2060Minister 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 \u200bviews \u200band without any basis.”<\/p>\n
“Equally outrageous is the \u200bunacceptable comparison the European Union \u200chas chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence,” he added.<\/p>\n
“As Israel and the US are ‘doing Europe’s dirty work’ by fighting for civilization against Jihadist lunatics in Iran and elsewhere, the European Union exposed its moral bankruptcy by drawing a false symmetry \u200cbetween Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists,” the \u200bIsraeli prime minister office posted on X.<\/p>\n
Senior \u200bHamas official Basem Naim also \u200bcriticized the move by EU ministers against his group, saying \u200cthat the EU insists on what \u200bhe described as political \u200bhypocrisy and racism.<\/p>\n
“It equates a fascist executioner who boasts of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, a rogue state that violates every international \u200blaw, with the victim \u200cwho defends itself according to all laws and statutes,” he told \u200bReuters.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Lili Bayer and Nidal Al Mughrabi; Editing by Inti \u200bLandauro, Peter Graff and Nick Zieminski)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BRUSSELS, May 11 (Reuters) – European Union foreign ministers reached an agreement on Monday on new sanctions targeting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[939,38792,1490,2585,40471,40470,16502,38789,442,21798],"class_list":{"0":"post-69827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kaja-kallas","8":"tag-european-union","9":"tag-foreign-ministers","10":"tag-foreign-policy","11":"tag-hamas","12":"tag-hamas-terrorists","13":"tag-israeli-citizens","14":"tag-israeli-prime-minister","15":"tag-israeli-settlers","16":"tag-kaja-kallas","17":"tag-occupied-west-bank"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116568828310422146","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}