Strasbourg, January 19th, 2024 – The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which demands the immediate release of the remaining hostages and a dismantling of terrorist organization Hamas as a condition for a ceasefire.
The amendments demanding conditionality for a ceasefire were supported by the party groups on the political right, thus confirming the voting pattern described by ECI in its first ever survey on the subject. The Israel vote ranking, which was conducted by a Brussels based research centre and presented in the European Parliament in Brussels in April of last year, revealed that Israel currently has its strongest support on the political right whereas the parties on the left are less inclined to support the Jewish state. The resolution, which in its original form demanded an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, was thus supported by the party groups on the left including the Greens but was also embraced by the former liberal group, now called Renew.
On October 19th, 2023 the European Parliament agreed with a compelling majority that Hamas can no longer be part of a solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that the terrorist organisation needs to be dismantled. But as the Belgium government assumed the rotating EU presidency on January 1st, 2024, the pressure to demand an unconditional ceasefire has grown, also gaining support from other EU member states.
In his remarks to the Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib, the Chairman of the European Parliament delegation to Israel, MEP Antonio López-Istúriz White reiterated that “there can be no sustainable peace as long as Hamas and other terrorist organizations are hijacking the Palestinian cause and are threatening the existence of Israel.”
He concluded by saying that “if we fail to keep our unity in this house (the European Parliament), we are simply becoming puppets of Iran and its proxies, and this is taking us even further away from a sustainable peace”.
The European Parliament resolution on the humanitarian situation in Gaza was adopted on Thursday, January 18th, 2024.
Elections for a new European Parliament will take place on 6-9 June 2024.
