We expect the EU to put Hamas back on the terror blacklist immediately: Netanyahu

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We expect the EU to put Hamas back on the terror blacklist immediately: Netanyahu

The decision by the European Court of Justice  to take Hamas off the EU’s list of terrorist organizations has been met with outrage from Israel. Attempts to explain that this was just a technical step that would be overturned before implementation, were rejected.

The Jerusalem Post reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, before a meeting with Joni Ernst, the newly elected Republican senator from Iowa, called it one example of “staggering” European “hypocrisy.”

Hamas, Netanyahu said, “has committed countless war crimes and countless terror acts. It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing. But we in Israel, we’ve learned. We’ll continue to defend our people and our state against the forces of terror and tyranny and hypocrisy.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who recently criticized Netanyahu for not taking a diplomatic initiative to rebuff anti-Israel moves internationally, said that to take Hamas off the list for “technical reasons” at a time when terrorism was on the rise throughout the world, and not only in the Middle East, was a “wrong decision” that sends exactly the wrong message.

Shortly after the angry reactions coming from Jerusalem, the EU’s External Action Service (EEAS), essentially the EU’s foreign service, said the EU court’s decision earlier in the day was a legal, not a political, decision that will likely be appeale

Mr Netanyahu had initially condemned the judgement in measured language when he said was “not satisfied” with the European explanation that Hamas’ removal was a “technical” matter.

The Telegraph reports that: A more robust tone came later in the day as the European parliament, in a separate development, voted overwhelmingly to support “in principle” a Palestinian state, in tandem with negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

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