| With horrifying images coming out of Gaza, Europeans have started looking for the right tools to exert pressure on Israel, but they might not be able to bridge their fundamental internal differences. It is not a secret that Europe has no coherent voice or unified foreign policy when it comes to Gaza. Few foreign policy issues are as divisive as Palestine and Israel. In recent months, EU leaders were very forceful in condemning the brutality of Hamas’s 7 October massacre and agreeing that a two-state solution is the only way to bring peace in the Middle East in the long term. But member states’ positions have been all over the place when it came to applying the same criticism to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, presenting 27 different nuances across the condemnation spectrum. Eight months into the war, Israel keeps pushing ahead with military action in southern Gaza despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Tel Aviv to halt it and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors looking into war crimes and crimes against humanity by both Israeli and Hamas leaders. The bar for the EU to act decisively is very low. In fact, it does not have too many options to exert pressure on Israel, but it does have some. On Monday (27 May) foreign ministers engaged in a “significant” discussion on sanctioning Israel, Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin told reporters before leaving Brussels. Such a step might be a rather distant prospect, especially with the scattered national positions, but also because imposing sanctions is usually the ultimate – and not the primary – choice of action. But first signs of a shift may already be there: Foreign ministers are seriously engaging in talks with Arab counterparts over future peace talks, several European countries are ready to recognise Palestinian statehood, and the EU may reactivate the EU’s Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) Rafah to monitor humanitarian aid flows into the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. | 