European Union has policy of double standards when dealing with the Palestinian cause
In January 2024, the EU established sanctions against individuals and entities supporting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It has now broadened these sanctions to also target members of Hamas’ Political Bureau, known as the ‘Politburo’.
EU extends Hamas sanctions to include 10 political members
According to the EU, the Politburo is a decision-making body, so its members are “responsible for violent actions carried out by Hamas.” 10 members now find themselves sanctioned. Measures include travel bans and the:
freezing of all funds and economic resources belonging to, owned, held or controlled by, members of the Politburo.
This decision comes as the Israeli occupation continues, with impunity, its fully documented genocide of Palestinians.
In a statement, Hamas has said the EU’s sanctioning of its political bureau, but not the Israeli occupation is:
a policy of double standards in dealing with the Palestinian cause.
It questions why political leaders defending their people’s legitimate rights are sanctioned, while the EU “turns a blind eye” to documented violations of international law carried out by “Israel”.
According to the EU, Hamas’:
violent actions constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law and of human rights law.
It has also accused Hamas of continuing to “represent a threat to international peace and security.”
Far fetched lies
But what about Israel? This is blatant hypocrisy. Far fetched lies against Hamas, including of mass rapes and beheaded babies on 7 October 2023, have been disproved by publications such as the Electronic Intifada. They are part of the occupation’s campaign to go to any lengths to justify its ongoing genocidal assault of Gaza.
Yet there is no doubt whatsoever about the Israeli occupation’s long list of international law violations. These began almost eight decades ago, when ‘Israel’ was formed in 1948. It forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, and has failed, to this day today, to respect their right to return. And its atrocities continue. These include the crimes of forcible displacement, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, starvation, torture, collective punishment, and genocide. It also systematically violates its ceasefire agreements.
These ‘Israeli’ war crimes and crimes against humanity, are not only directed towards Palestinians. Since 2023, it has also targeted countries across the Middle East– Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen.
‘Israel’ a threat to humanity
‘Israel’ has global supply chains, and one of the most advanced, heavily funded militaries in the world. It also has a total disregard for humanity, and fails to comply with any international rules or norms. In reality, nothing threatens global peace and security more than the Israeli occupation. It a serious threat not only to regional and international peace and security. but the entire international legal framework.
By expanding its sanctions on Hamas, the EU claims it is “holding perpetrators accountable”. It also states that it demonstrates that “violent actions and extremism carry consequences.”
But as yet, the EU has taken no effective measures against the criminal state of “Israel” which, as of 4 June 2026, has killed 72,956 Palestinians in Gaza, and injured 173,043. It has sanctioned several illegal settlers, out of the more than 780,000 residing in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. But sanctioning a few of these is nothing more than theatre.
EU failing Palestinian people
These settlers carry out criminal acts for the Zionist government, which the EU has failed to sanction. There have been no arms embargos, no trade sanctions. The EU is the Israeli occupation’s largest trading partner. Trade in goods between the two amounted to €43.3 billion in 2025. The EU takes in nearly 30 percent of all Israeli occupation exports, while accounting for almost 35 percent of all goods imported into ‘Israel’.
It is the Israeli occupation that is the source of conflict and instability. There would be no Hamas if there were no occupation. Resistance to “Israel” is a legal right for all Palestinians, guaranteed under international law, so cannot be criminalised.
Hamas says the targeting of its political leaders confirms these sanctions come “as a response to pressure from the occupation and are not based on standards of justice.” And it calls on the EU to “review its biased policies, cease providing political cover for the occupation, and work to hold its leaders accountable instead of prosecuting the victims.”
According to Hamas, the will of the Palestinian people and their legitimate national rights will not be undermined, irrespective of any measures introduced.
Featured image via Getty/John Moore
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What does it take for The Canary / Skwarkbox to report from a basis of fact, which should be as easy as 1-2-3 :
1. The MIC owns all Western political systems wholesale.
2. All politicians are purely self-serving.
3. Democracy and Human Rights institutions are illusions (UN, International Law, ICJ, ICC etc).
All the facts, all their actions prove this, and have done for the last three years. The Gaza genocide pulled all the masks off. Yet your journalists haven’t caught up.
You listen to their words without watching their actions. You don’t join the dots. You focus micro not macro. You don’t critically think. You don’t try to see where this is all leading.
You still believe in the scamdemic FFS! Which was simply a bank/corpo bailout and the biggest transfer of wealth from public to private hands in human history, with tens of TRILLIONS enriching the MIC/billionaire class.
Do better. Its difficult, it means admitting everything you thought was true, was a lie. That’s hard. But unless you do, you’re not doing your job properly. And that’s no different to the corpo-pr-pigs of the MSM.
If you don’t like what you read just go and read your news somewhere else!
which bit of the above do you disagree with?
Firstly, COVID was real.
People lost loved ones, and had to choose which one person was allowed to visit them as they died. Your comment is hugely insensitive to those who lost loved ones and the heroic efforts of the NHS staff who risked both their lives and their mental and physical wellbeing without the basic equipment they needed, who merely received a frankly insulting government encouraged Thursday clap of appreciation while MPs voted to increase their own salaries.
And we should never forget the ‘essential workers’ as the establishment did, forcing them to work through the lockdown and then immediately returning their prior classification of ‘unskilled/low skilled workers’ as soon as lockdown was done with.
I do not think it is ever appropriate to bring up the admittedly massive political and economic aspects and ramifications of the pandemic without acknowledging the efforts, sacrifices and exploitation of these massive sections of the population – and I am sure I have missed other groups who put massive efforts into helping the country through the pandemic only to be discarded and forgotten as soon as they weren’t considered vital, or worse never even having their efforts acknowledged. Any other groups or individuals that I have not mentioned who were exploited and forgotten, please accept my apologies in advance for not acknowledging you.
Neo-liberalism exploits engineered crises in order to facilitate wealth transfer from the state and general population to the super rich. The difference with COVID is only that it was not an engineered crisis, but shock politics is indifferent to the cause of a crisis so the pandemic was also used as an excuse for a massive wealth transfer from the state to the super rich – the UK government took on debt equivalent to almost £20,000 per person and it is clear that a tiny fraction of that actually made it to the general population, and the government seem to have no idea what happened to that huge amount of debt that was claimed to be supporting the population and economy. Instead it increased wealth inequality in a massive way.*
However, I am unclear how that has any relevance to the story in question. This is an entirely different neo-liberal tactic, the selective use of economic sanctions. In many cases they are purely symbolic, such as those enacted against Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and certain individuals in the Israeli colonial paramilitaries they refer to as settlers. In other cases they are an act of collective punishment leveraged against states that dare to defy the global capitalist system which lead to as many deaths worldwide as violent conflict according to a 2025 study published in The Lancet**. They are also used to delegitimise resistance groups with political wings fighting diplomatically and armed wings who resist western imperialist aggressions who have a legal right to armed resistance against occupiers or invaders such as Hamas in this case, or Hezbollah who the UK government have proscribed as a terrorist organisation in it’s entirety despite them currently having 15 elected members sitting in the Lebanese parliament.
These would seem to be more relevant additions to the article above than your comments – not that I think the article has failed by not mentioning these points, it is a news article, not opinion or analysis. The aim is to provide the latest on an ongoing situation while providing context for the hypocrisy the EU is flaunting (the key part neglected by MSM) and in my opinion it achieves that goal.
My comments were offered purely as an example of more relevant further context to the situation, in contrast to your non-constructive critical rant, which fails to make clear what problem you have with the article or how it holds any direct relevance to the article.
As I mentioned above, this is a news piece rather than opinion or analysis. Everything following the heading ‘Far Fetched Lies’ would be missing from any MSM coverage of this news so I would like to congratulate Charlie Jaay on a well written example of true journalism that is missing outside the thankfully expanding left wing independent media ecosystem that The Canary is a key part of.
Do you want every article published to detail the full conspiracy of the military-industrial-financial complex that perpetuates the illusion of democracy that we are all subjected to and coerced by? Because that would get REALLY repetitive.
If you are going to make a critical comment please think about what you are criticising and why, and then do your best to express that clearly. Being constructively critical is fine, actively encouraged generally, but randomly attacking the work of a fellow leftist who is actively working to build the left wing independent media ecosystem is not. It may be in a small way, but your comment actively impedes that work.
I hope that you take this on, and even more I hope in some small way that this rebuttal has more of a positive impact on the writer and website than whatever negative impact your frankly incoherent polemic may have had.
*https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2021/10/Wealth-gap-year-Section-3.pdf
**https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00189-5/fulltext
“Do you want every article published to detail the full conspiracy of the military-industrial-financial complex that perpetuates the illusion of democracy that we are all subjected to and coerced by? Because that would get REALLY repetitive.”
Yes. That’s exactly what should be happening, except you call it conspiracy, when its evidenced fact. The usual smear tactic by those who benefit from the bullshit.
Anybody can think what they like about covid, propaganda is powerful. However the fact is that; it suddenly appeared when the banks and markets were screaming for more bailouts.
The TRILLIONS transferred to them from public funds, you would call a “coincidence”, although every aspect supports the future were are now in – extremist inequality, MIC ownership of democracy, atomised society, perpetual genocide/war and corporate welfare. To pretend that’s not the case just proves your abject ignorance.
Its only getting worse, and while supposedly “alt” journalists at The Canary and elsewhere can’t, or won’t, see the wood from the trees, nothing will change. So here’s the guide again, let’s try it differently. Reporting from a basis of FACT is as easy as A-B-C :
A. The MIC owns all Western political systems wholesale.
B. All politicians are purely self-serving.
C. Democracy and Human Rights institutions are illusions (UN, International Law, ICJ, ICC etc).
All the facts, all their actions prove this, and have done for the last three years. The Gaza genocide pulled all the masks off. Yet your journalists haven’t caught up.
Try harder. Do better.
Firstly apologies if I was unclear – I was stating the military-industrial-financial complex conspiracy as an accepted fact that we appeared to share, not dismissing it/you as a conspiracy theory/theorist.
However I do think if you had read what I commented, and the passage you in fact quoted, a little more carefully you would have seen that made clear that I think it “perpetuates the illusion of democracy that we are all subjected to and coerced by”, which reinforces the fact that I am calling it a conspiracy as an accurate description of the hidden system, and not the pejorative of a conspiracy theory. I concede that the whole Epstein thing has made the term conspiracy somewhat ambiguous so maybe a better phrase could’ve been used.
Either way, we agree on that point it would seem?
Now I am unclear why you think I would call the massive wealth transfer a “coincidence” (or why you put it in quotation marks as if I had used the term anywhere in my comment, kind of misrepresentative) when I made my view of neo-liberalism very clear? A sample quote is that neo-liberalism “indifferent to the cause of a crisis so the pandemic was also used as an excuse for a massive wealth transfer from the state to the super rich”. And I mentioned the massive and increasing wealth inequality, with a citation to back it up.
I may not have mentioned atomised society or corporate welfare over public welfare, but nothing I said suggests I would believe otherwise. My point was that you brought up wealth transfer in a comment on a story about inequality of economic sanctions and it was not directly relevant. My comments citing The Lancet were offered as a relevant comment.
While I don’t agree 100% with your ABC points, I agree way more than I disagree and I wouldn’t wish to speak for all contributors and staff of The Canary but the feeling I get is that a lot of them and a lot of people reading here take those ABC points as a given, to a lesser or greater extent depending on the individual, and their content is largely presented that way.
We literally seem to agree broadly on the state of the global system, but you’ve not argued against my points, you’ve set up a straw man argument to rant at.
Your comments are entirely superfluous to the conversation and to my comments – do you read The Canary regularly? Because your ABC are firstly not entirely proven facts, there is a fuck ton of evidence but that can be read differently by others, and secondly a week or two skimming article titles even and you would see that they hugely engage with and present those stories that are strong evidence of the very simplistic ABC you’ve stated, often with nuance that is relevant, like I pointed to the section in this specific article that does that.
I can’t think you have read my comments, this article or The Canary properly before ranting the writer or me, so you don’t seem to be engaging in good faith and have made any discussion pointless. Show that’s not the case and I’ll happily re-engage with you.
Otherwise go take your ranty comment anger out commenting on literally any other UK news source outside a handful of left wing independent media outlets – thanks, you know who you are 🙂
The ABC points are unarguable if you watch their actions rather than believe their words. We “rant” here as you demean the facts stated, because “alternative” journalists should know better.
The Canary has, and still is, deceiving new generations to buy into an MIC-owned party political system which is an illusion of democracy, by claiming neolibdem Wak Polanski and his Greens are anything different to what has gone before.
Also by claiming the UK judiciary are independent of the state in some delusional separation-of-powers fairy tale. They are not, as proved by the obscene sentencing of anti-genocide protesters this week.
Also by lapping up, unquestioning, the scamdemic nonsense, which was entirely manufactured to achieve the ends we outlined in the 1 2 3 post above. Further confirmed today with the trillionaire Musk announcement.
All this adds up to The Canary steering towards becoming Guardian-lite rather than a radical alternative. They want comments. Here are the comments. If Canary journalists don’t like the comments, switch off the option to do so like The Guardian does. Become a state propaganda mouthpiece (lite).
We’ve been clear, you AJ, notsomuch. We’re not interested in discussing this with you, because what we state is Truth, not opinion. Truth is not up for debate.
You’re welcome.