The EU diplomatic service has confirmed that British company Page Protective Services (PPS) will guard its people in Gaza and the West Bank despite the firm's poor track record. A note published on the EU's Tenders ...

“As you can see, I have no electricity at home at this moment,” says Yousef via Skype. “I have a fuel generator that I can use during the power cuts. If I run out of fuel, like now, I have a transformer connected to a ...

France and the Netherlands have joined an initiative by 13 EU states to help European consumers boycott goods made by Israeli settlers on Palestinian land. Foreign ministers from the group - which also includes Austria, ...

Catherine Ashton's EU foreign service recently gave its biggest security contract to a company with a frightening track record. Then they took it away again, posing questions on the professionalism of her staff. Ashton' ...

I vividly remember two years ago, in April 2011, when the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) were sending the message that Palestinians are ready ...

Israeli President Shimon Peres has urged the EU to get behind his novel idea on how to stop the war in Syria - by sending in Arab peacekeepers under a UN mandate. Speaking to press in the European Parliament in ...

Israeli President Shimon Peres has urged the EU to put Hezbollah on its list of terrorist organisations, claiming that failure to do so would be an indication that the EU was prepared to tolerate its actions. Speaking ...

Senior EU diplomats have called for financial sanctions and travel bans on Israeli settlers in what they describe as a last-ditch effort to save the Middle East peace process. An internal report by EU countries' consuls ...

The efforts of one Palestinian man to get to his scholarship at a European university show how cut off Gaza is from the normal world. Twenty-four-year-old Maysara al-Arabeed left Gaza for the first time in his life on ...

Israel last month showed off the accuracy of its weapons by bombing a football stadium in Gaza. But civilian deaths and settlement expansion have caused diplomatic defeats. At about 9am local time on 17 November an ...

The Prime Minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, has appealed to the EU to take his political and militant group, Hamas, off its terrorist register. Speaking to a delegation of visiting parliamenterians from Poland, Portugal ...

Just one EU country - the Czech Republic - voted against Palestine's bid to become a UN "observer state" on Thursday (29 November). Fourteen others - Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, ...

The Palestinians are about to compound their 1947 UN blunder with yet another misstep at the world body. No EU country should be complicit in this mistake. The war between Hamas and Israel has barely ended, but the ...

An EU declaration to be published on the day of a historic UN vote on Palestine does little to hide internal division on the subject. The statement - a draft of which was seen by EUobserver - repeats the Union's ...

Both sides in the new Gaza conflict are competing for international sympathy as fighting escalates. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told EUobserver on Thursday (15 November) morning that Prime Minister Benjamin ...

MEPs have set the scene for an ill-tempered debate on Israeli settlements after the trade committee narrowly endorsed removing trade barriers for Israeli medical products. Centre-right deputies in the EPP group on ...

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso has pledged support for a future Palestinian state on his first official trip to the region. Speaking alongside Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah on Sunday ...

EU foreign ministers recently said that ending the Middle East conflict was a fundamental interest of the European Union. If this is indeed the case, Europe should pay much more attention to what is happening in the ...

Few issues of diplomatic conversation today have quite the same ability to generate a rolling of the eyes and turning of the page as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Stuck is an understatement. Israel’s government ...

The European External Action Service (EEAS) has awarded a juicy contract to British security firm G4S in Libya despite the fact it has no permission to work there. The €10 million contract covers bodyguards and building ...

The EU's joint police body, Europol has noted there were no succesful Islamist attacks in Europe last year, while warning about future Toulouse-type 'lone wolves.' Its report, out on Wednesday (25April), highlighted ...

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in Brussels signed an agreement on Monday (19 March) to build a waste water treatment plant in the West Bank and improve a key border ...

The EU should get ready for Palestine's renewed push to upgrade its UN status and stop calling for "illusory" peace talks with Israel, a senior Palestinian politician has said. Palestine grabbed world attention in New ...

With all eyes on violence in Syria, some EU countries are becoming increasingly concerned about the risk of instability in neighbouring Jordan. A senior EU diplomatic contact told this website on Wednesday (8 February) ...

The EU has said it will keep on giving money to the Palestinian authorities despite their new deal with Hamas, an EU-designated terrorist group. Foreign relations spokesman Michael Mann said on Monday (6 February) that ...

The figures say it all. 1,200 Jewish settlers occupied outposts in the West Bank in 1972; in 2012 over 300,000 live in fortress-like settlements on hilltops overlooking the Jordan Valley – excluding the illegal ...

The situation in our part of the Middle East does not appear to make much sense at first glance. Israel has declared that it supports the establishment of two states for two peoples - which includes a Palestinian state. ...

One of the most striking elements of the outside involvement in the Arab Spring is the failure of the Obama administration to develop a comprehensive approach in dealing with the uprisings. The United States is unable ...