The EU Commission has washed its hands of a senior official's remark that Israel was committing "genocide" in Gaza, leaving her open to furious Israeli accusations.
"It's not for the commission to judge on this question [Gaza genocide] and definition, but really for the courts and there has been no college decision on this specific subject," a commission spokeswoman said in Brussels on Friday (5 September).
The "college" is the full group of all 27 EU commissioners, including president Ursula von der Leyen.
Another commission spokesman said on Friday it was "the competence of national courts as well as international courts, which have jurisdiction on the legal qualification of such an act, an act of genocide, and can do a proper establishment of facts and findings of law".
"There's no [EU] commission position on this," he added.
They spoke after commission vice-president Teresa Ribeira said in a speech at the Sciences Po university in Paris on Thursday: "The genocide in Gaza exposes Europe's failure to act and speak with one voice".
Israel's foreign ministry spokesman, Oren Marmortsein, said on X on Friday: "Ribera has made herself a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda".
He also accused her of "parroting the 'genocide' blood libel spread by Hamas".
Palestinian militant group Hamas is designated as a "terrorist" entity by the EU, US, and Israel.
"Blood libel" refers to antisemitic medieval legends that Jews sacrificed Christian babies and drank their blood.
But Hamas or Israeli propaganda aside, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an authoritative academic body founded in 1994, saw things differently.
"Israel's policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)," it said in a resolution on 1 September.
And they were not the only ones.
A classified EU foreign service study of Gaza said in June that Israel was "in violation of an ICJ provisional ruling" designed to "prevent the commission of acts within the scope of the genocide convention".
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled in 2024 there were "plausible" grounds to accuse Israel of the world's most heinous crime, pending a final verdict.
Meanwhile, Ribera herself is a former law professor at the University of Madrid.
She is also a member of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez' socialist party, with Sánchez having accused Israel of "genocide" already in June.
The EU's former top diplomat, Josep Borrell, who is also a Spanish socialist, accused Israel of "genocide" in August.
Irish foreign minister Simon Harris spoke of Israel's "horrific genocide that is underway in Gaza" in Copenhagen on 31 August, while Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prévot said on 1 September his country would recognise Palestinian sovereignty "to prevent any risk of genocide".
Israel reacted each time by accusing them of Jew-hatred.
But speaking to Israel's Haaretz newspaper this week, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is also a historian, said Israel was out of touch with modernity.
On one hand, Israelis had become "blazé" toward genocide accusations, because Israel's enemies had overused the term in smaller, previous conflicts, he said.
On the other hand, Ben-Ami added: "We, in Israel, think of genocide only in terms of the Holocaust, we draw comparisons only with the Holocaust, [and] obviously this is not the case [in Gaza]".
The Nazis systematically exterminated 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War.
Israel has directly killed over 64,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while indirect deaths, from lack of food or medical care, were seen as likely much higher.
But "the definition of genocide has changed over the years" since the 1940s, Ben-Ami said.
"At issue isn't the method of death or the numbers - it's the intention [to destroy an ethnic group]", he said.
This was why the ICJ said the murder of 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs in 1995 was "genocide", for instance.
And Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, among others, had incriminated Israel by publicly calling for the extermination of Palestinians in the Gaza war, Ben-Ami said.
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Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.