STRASBOURG — The European Parliament called for a “permanent cease-fire” in Israel’s war against Hamas, but said this must be conditional on Hamas releasing the hostages it took in the October 7 attacks as well as the full demilitarization of Gaza.
The close-run vote was a victory for the political right in the Parliament, with the center-right European People’s Party faction having threatened to pull support for the text if the cease-fire demand was not explicitly linked to those two conditions.
Political groups to the left of the EPP — including the Socialists and Democrats — wanted the Parliament to call for an unconditional cease-fire. In the end the EPP’s threat to kill the entire text if its conditions weren’t adopted passed by a narrow 13 votes, and was helped over the line by liberal and socialist lawmakers and a handful of Greens, who broke ranks with the majority of their groups.
“I would say this is a moral failure of the European Parliament,” said Palestine’s Deputy Head of Mission Adel Atieh. “With this vote, Europe is losing credibility,” he said. However, he said there are “positive” aspects of the vote, such as its call to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and support for the work of the International Court of Justice, where Israel is facing accusations of genocide.
Israel’s Ambassador to the EU Haim Regev said: “We are happy to see that the European Parliament understands the need to release the hostages and disarm Hamas before any cease-fire.”
The Parliament has little sway over the foreign policy of the 27-country bloc, and the EU at large has been riven with divisions on the issue.
On Tuesday, Slovenia’s EU Commissioner Janez Lenarčič pleaded with MEPs to come to a unified position, saying: “It would help us and increase our leverage if there were one voice with which European Union would speak.”
“We all want it to end and there is a solution for that: the release of Israeli hostages and the demilitarization of Gaza,” the EPP’s lead negotiator António López-Istúriz White said during a debate this week.
Hilde Vautmans, a Belgian liberal MEP who negotiated for the centrist Renew group, said the EPP’s successful push was unfortunate. But she added: “We should look at what we have achieved for the first time,” listing multiple examples in the text ranging from “Israel is obstructing humanitarian aid to Gaza’s starving population” to “we call for sanctions against extremist [Israeli] settlers.”
Until now the Parliament as a whole had only called for a “humanitarian pause” rather than a cease-fire when it voted in October.
In the end, 312 MEPs voted in favor, with 131 voting against and 72 abstaining, though information about how each MEP voted on the final text will not be made public because no political faction has requested it.
