Children look on as people walk amid the rubble of a building destroyed in an overnight Israeli strike in the northern Gaza Strip on March 18, 2025. (Bashar Taleb / AFP via Getty Images)

Since Donald Trump abruptly changed US policy toward Ukraine, there has been a lot of talk about European countries needing to step up to the plate and defend the liberal international order. Politicians like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz have used this line of argument to justify a massive increase in military spending by the states of Europe.

However, when it comes to Israel’s renewed onslaught against the people of Gaza, you couldn’t fit a blue-and-yellow handkerchief between the positions of the US and the European Union (EU).

Thursday’s meeting of the European Council, which brings together the prime ministers of all the EU member states, issued the following statement:

The European Council deplores the breakdown of the ceasefire in Gaza, which has caused a large number of civilian casualties in recent air strikes. It deplores the refusal of Hamas to hand over the remaining hostages. The European Council calls for an immediate return to the full implementation of the ceasefire-hostage release agreement.

Eve Geddie of Amnesty International described this communique as “another shameful attempt to justify Israel’s genocide and war crimes against Palestinians.” As Geddie pointed out, the statement did not even name Israel, let alone condemn it for killing hundreds of people with air strikes that were designed to target civilians during their predawn Ramadan meal.

 “Total Devastation”

According to the European Council, it was “the breakdown of the ceasefire in Gaza” that killed those people, not the Israeli bombs and missiles that blew them to pieces. Although the council did not say directly who was responsible for the breakdown, the sentence that followed deploring “the refusal of Hamas to hand over the remaining hostages” made it absolutely clear where it placed the blame. The EU’s most important organ could find nothing to deplore in Israel’s conduct over the past few days.

In reality, as all of the European leaders who gave their approval to this statement know, it was Israel that unilaterally broke the cease-fire after trying to change the terms of the deal to which it signed up in January. If Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to secure the release of the Israeli hostages who are still in Gaza, he only had to follow through on the commitments that he made two months ago.

Netanyahu refused to begin moving into the second stage of the cease-fire agreement because it would mean a permanent halt to his campaign of mass murder. Resuming the slaughter of Palestinian civilians has kept his far-right coalition partners happy and diverted attention from his purge of the Israeli army and intelligence services.

The European Council statement was all the more shameful because it was issued after the bloodcurdling message that Netanyahu’s defense minister, Israel Katz, addressed to Gaza’s civilian population, leaving no room for misunderstanding:

Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza, and the second Sinwar will bring upon it total ruin. The Israeli Air Force’s attack against Hamas terrorists was only the first step. What follows will be far harsher, and you will bear the full cost. Evacuation of the population from combat zones will soon resume.

If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not kicked out of Gaza, Israel will act with force you have not known before. Take the advice of the US President: return the hostages and kick out Hamas, and new options will open up for you — including relocation to other parts of the world for those who choose. The alternative is destruction and total devastation.

 Impunity for War Crimes

The statement by Katz supplied further material for the judges and lawyers working on cases against his government at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Israel and its leaders are currently facing trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, with a mountain of evidence already piled up.

It is more than a year since the ICJ issued a set of orders requiring Israel to protect the people of Gaza from the threat of genocide — orders that it has flagrantly violated from day one. It is more than four months since the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Katz, who took over from Gallant when Netanyahu sacked him, has done more than enough to earn a warrant of his own.

Unlike the United States, every EU member has signed up to the Rome Statute that established the ICC. The court is based in the Netherlands, one of the EU’s founding states. António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, presidents of the European Council and the European Commission respectively, issued statements last month condemning the Trump administration’s move to impose sanctions on the ICC.

However, when they should be condemning Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, EU officials act as if the arrest warrant for Netanyahu simply does not exist. Three European states — France, Italy, and Greece — even allowed Netanyahu’s plane to pass through their airspace last month on his way to and from the United States. A few days later, von der Leyen’s statement on the ICC claimed that Europe would “always stand for justice and the respect of international law.”

There is no difference in practical terms between railing furiously against the ICC on the one hand and paying lip service to its role while rejecting its decisions on the other. Beneath the rhetorical sugarcoating, the attitude of the EU and its leading member states reveals the same contempt for international law and the lives of Palestinian civilians that the Trump administration has so ostentatiously displayed.

Daniel Finn