EU agrees stalled sanctions on Israeli settlers
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• Seven organisations to be blacklisted for supporting ‘violent colonisation of West Bank’
• Israeli rights group warns of land grab in east Jerusalem registration drive
• Israeli forces kill another Palestinian in West Bank
BRUSSELS: European Union foreign ministers on Monday agreed new sanctions on Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians, as a change of government in Hungary ended months of blockage.
“It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery,” EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas said in announcing the green light. “Extremisms and violence carry consequences.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the EU was “sanctioning the main Israeli organisations guilty of supporting the extremist and violent colonisation of the West Bank, as well as their leaders”.
“These most serious and intolerable acts must cease without delay,” he wrote on social media.
The move in response to rising violence and settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank had been stalled by Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orban. But the ouster of the nationalist leader and Israel ally by Peter Magyar now appears to have paved the way for the veto to be lifted.
EU officials said seven settlers or settler organisations would be blacklisted. The bloc also agreed to sanction representatives from the Palestinian group Hamas. Israel condemned the new sanctions, asserting that Jews have the right to settle in the occupied West Bank.
Foreign ministers meeting in Brussels discussed calls to ban products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Italy’s Antonio Tajani said that the EU’s executive would now make a proposal on the move and then the bloc would see if it had enough backing from member states.
Land registration drive
Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group regretted on Monday that initial data from a land registration drive launched in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem pointed to a “deeply alarming” trend of land appropriation by the Israeli state.
Israel resumed land registration in east Jerusalem in 2018, reviving a process that had largely been suspended after it occupied and annexed the territory in 1967.
Bimkom, an Israeli rights group focused on urban planning and the protection of Palestinian rights in east Jerusalem, examined the first official data covering roughly 2.3 square kilometres, or about three per cent of east Jerusalem, where registration procedures have been completed.
It found that 82pc of the land surveyed had been registered under the Israeli state or the Jerusalem municipality.
Another 9pc was listed under “unknown owners” — a classification the group described as an initial step toward eventual state takeover — while 4pc was registered to Jewish owners, most of them allegedly connected to the settler movement.
According to the NGO, approximately 4pc of the plots were registered to churches, while only 1pc was recorded under Palestinian ownership. Bimkom warned that the registration process is being used by Israeli authorities for “effectively taking land ... from beneath people’s feet”, calling it “deeply alarming”.
“This data clearly indicates that the renewed... procedures do not serve — and were not intended to serve — the Palestinian residents of the city, but rather to provide a bureaucratic tool for the appropriation of Palestinian land for the benefit of the state.”
The areas where registration has already been completed largely correspond to vacant land earmarked for settlement construction, a pattern Bimkom says reinforces concerns that political motivations are driving the process.
The NGO added that some of these zones also include Palestinian homes, many of which have reportedly been registered under the state or entities linked to settlement groups.
Bimkom also denounced what it described as increasingly restrictive measures toward Palestinians, for whom proving land ownership has become nearly impossible.
Palestinian man killed
The Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces killed a young Palestinian man in the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Monday. The Ramallah-based ministry said it had been informed of the “martyrdom of 30-year-old Ayman Rafiq Mohammad al-Hashlamoun, who was shot by occupation forces near Qalandiya refugee camp”.
Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2026
