The European Union foreign policy chief said Sunday the bloc should consider sanctioning far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for comments he said constitute “incitement to war crimes.”
Writing on X, Josep Borrell condemns Ben Gvir, the national security minister, for once again urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cut all aid and fuel to the Gaza Strip.
He also slammed the “sinister statements” of Smotrich, who is finance minister and a minister in the Defense Ministry, and said he supports UN rights chief Volker Turk in his condemnations. Smotrich recently remarked that starving 2 million Gazans by withholding aid — in order to get the Hamas hostages back — might be “justified and moral.” Turk condemned the comments and said they should be investigated and punished if found to be a crime.
Smotrich later told Kan news his comments had been misunderstood. “What I said is that we must allow in humanitarian aid because no one will let us starve Gazans, but what I also said is that morally we must condition [the entry of] humanitarian aid on a humanitarian [concession] and tell Hamas, the Gazans and the world that we allow aid in under the condition that they return our hostages,” Smotrich said.
“The hostages are languishing in the tunnels and we pamper the Gaza Strip [with aid]. In my eyes, this is immoral and unjust,” he added.
“Sanctions must be on our EU agenda,” Borrell wrote.
“I urge the Israeli government to unequivocally distance itself from these incitements to commit war crimes,” he said, adding that Jerusalem must show “good faith” in talks for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
During a Sunday radio interview, Ben Gvir denounced the notion of continued talks to reach a hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza, suggesting instead that cutting off fuel and aid to Gazans would “bring them to their knees in two weeks.”
Last month US officials told The Times of Israel that the Biden administration had considered including both ministers in sanctions against extremist settlers accused of attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. Two US officials said the idea was raised several times.
US President Joe Biden initially rejected the idea, arguing that the US should not be sanctioning elected officials. But the proposal resurfaced as Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians continued, and as Israeli authorities continued taking steps to expand their footprint in the West Bank, the officials said.
As national security minister, Ben Gvir has directed police he oversees to take a lax approach to settler violence, a US official said at the time.
Vigilante violence by Israeli settlers has spiked in the West Bank since the Hamas terror group’s October 7 onslaught, when thousands of terrorists entered Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war in Gaza.
And as finance minister and minister in charge of settlement affairs in the Defense Ministry, Smotrich advanced a quid pro quo arrangement in June that saw Israel advance plans for roughly 5,000 settlement homes, legalize five wildcat outposts, and expropriate large amounts of land in the West Bank. In exchange, Smotrich agreed to release hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues that he had been withholding from the Palestinian Authority, which had brought it to the brink of financial collapse.
In the days and weeks before the finance minister agreed to release the funds, sanctioning him was again seriously considered by the Biden administration, a US official told The Times of Israel at the time.