The Spanish Government has already begun the procedures to impose sanctions on a first group of 12 violent Israeli settlers, as announced this Monday by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, before the Joint Congress-Senate Commission. These settlers, who have harassed and attacked the Palestinian population in the West Bank to force them to abandon their land, will be banned from entering Spain, as explained by diplomatic sources.
The list will be approved shortly but will not be made public for reasons of personal data protection and will be expanded as more information is collected or new attacks occur. The list managed by Foreign Affairs includes several dozen names. The restrictive measures do not include the freezing of the assets of extremist settlers in Spain, if they had them, as there is no European agreement that supports this measure, according to the same sources.
Albares already announced on the 19th in Brussels that Spain would unilaterally apply sanctions after the EU did not reach an agreement on the matter due to the veto of the Government of Hungarian Viktor Orbán. It will not be the only country to do so, as the United States, France and the United Kingdom have approved measures against extremist settlers, responsible for many of the 372 murders of Palestinians, 94 of them children, that have occurred in the West Bank since the October 7, when Hamas launched its terrorist attack against Israel, until January 26, according to the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Most of the names on the Spanish list coincide with those banned by other countries.
The head of Spanish diplomacy has once again called for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire” and “urgent access of humanitarian aid to Gaza”, where 30,000 Palestinians have already died, many of them women and children; and two million are at risk from Israeli bombings, malnutrition and lack of health care. After having delivered 3.5 million euros to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Albares has announced that his department is finalizing “a much larger contribution”, in addition to defending the maintenance of EU aid, against the countries that have suspended it for the alleged involvement of a dozen United Nations employees in the Hamas terrorist attack.
For its part, the Ministry of Defense has reported the delivery of 110 cargo parachutes to deliver aid to the population of Gaza, in response to the call of King Abdullah II of Jordan. In recent days, the United States, France, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (USA) have airdropped humanitarian aid packages over the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, Albares has announced that on Friday, at the request of the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, with whom he met that same day in Madrid, he sent a letter to the institution in which he proposes that the EU legislative body and the Spanish Government reach an “administrative agreement” so that Catalan, Basque and Galician are co-official languages in the EU legislative body.
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After recalling that Spain has agreed to bear the cost of the translations, the minister explained that, unlike the European Council, before which he already raised a similar request for all the community institutions last August, in the European Parliament there is no Unanimity is necessary, but it is enough for the Chamber Board to agree, which is why it has called on the PP to convince the European popular group in Strasbourg to support the measure. Your support, essential, would be enough for it to prosper.
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