Photo: Dan Vernon
Al-Haq welcomes the French Occupied Territories Bill tabled on 23 June 2026 by three lawmakers aiming at outlawing in France, “commercial relations contributing, by aid or assistance, to the colonising policy” conducted by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and the Occupied Syrian Golan, targeting financial products and services, as well as publicity.
Al-Haq applauds Olivier Faure, First Secretary of the Socialist Party, as well as Sabrina Sebaihi, of the Social and Ecologist Group and Richard Ramos, Deputy Secretary General of the Democratic Movement, for their strong principled actions on tabling the Bill. The Bill represents a crucial step towards ending Israel’s genocidal erasure, and unlawful presence and apartheid, as recommended by the International Court of Justice in its Palestine Advisory Opinion (19 July 2024), and UN General Assembly Resolution A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1 (18 September 2024), which France voted in favour of.
Presented as an effort to comply with France’s international obligations and diplomatic stands, the bill will be submitted to a vote after the summer holidays. Mr Faure stated to the press at the National Assembly (lower chamber of the French Parliament): “We must obviously block and ban all forms of imports – whether goods, financial products, investments, or services – that currently enable settlers to continue making a living from the settlements . . . If we let the colonisation spread out like it does nowadays, there will be nothing left . . . not to mention Gaza”.
Mr Ramos noted that his party, the Democratic Movement– which is also the party of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean Noel Barrot– regarded the initiative with “benevolence”: “The reason I’m moving forward here is that I believe the government also has the intention to act, perhaps through a different channel, but yes, we are discussing the matter”.
In April 2026, France and Sweden jointly wrote to the European Commission calling for the EU to “urgently consider the legal and practical feasibility of introducing measures such as tariffs on settlement products and import restrictions through export licenses, on the basis that the illegal settlements fall outside the scope of the Association Agreement.” To date, France has opted to defer its sovereign competence to independently legislate to block the reception of illegal settlement goods and services into France, to the European Union (EU), which would arguably require unanimity across the EU-bloc–– a vote which is impossible to achieve.
By deferring to the EU, France is acting with knowledge to evade its Third State responsibility to prevent sustaining and providing a market for the products and services obtained by internationally wrongful acts carried out in the OPT and Occupied Syrian Golan. Other EU countries have not been impeded from implementing domestic legislation to prohibit settlement trade– Ireland, Slovenia and Spain have already adopted restrictive legislation, and the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway are expected to follow.
Israel is rapidly expanding settlements across the West Bank. It has approved at least 75 settlements in 2025 and 2026. It is also worth highlighting that settlers themselves erected 84 settlement outposts in 2024 and 2025. Settlement expansion is a product of Israel’s policy of unlawful demographic engineering in the OPT, which has deprived Palestinians of approximately 70 percent their lands in Area C–– illegally confiscated by Israel as state lands, natural reserves, and military training areas.
Settlement expansion and public encouragement by Israeli far-right ministers has led to a sharp increase in settler violence, especially since October 2023. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has recorded 2,803 attacks by Israeli settlers resulting in casualties and/or property damage in the West Bank, from 1 January 2025 to 31 May 2026. These attacks have caused the death of 22 Palestinians in this period. Between January 2025 and June 2026, UN OCHA recorded 303 Palestinians, including 70 children were killed and 5,407 Palestinians were injured in the West Bank, 3,033 setter attacks were recorded, and 40,965 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes.
Reflecting this escalation, Phillipe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), warned in March 2026 that “large groups of settlers storm Palestinian communities, brutalise residents and torch buildings”, adding: “what is worse is that these egregious acts are accompanied by total impunity”. Some of these groups are trained and equipped by the State of Israel, leading to the emergence of violent settler militias or “State backed terror squads”, to quote UN Experts.
In light of the above, we call on France to adhere to its obligations by adopting national legislation prohibiting trade with illegal Israeli settlements, which would impede their economic development and thus, put pressure on Israel to remove its unlawful presence from the OPT as rapidly as possible, as required by the ICJ Palestine Advisory Opinion (19 July 2024), and UN General Assembly Resolution A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1 (18 September 2024).
Considering that the EU is Israel’s first commercial partner, its leverage is significant and so is its responsibility for Israeli crimes. Member States should impose an EU-wide ban on trade with the settlements, encompassing both products and services, and regain some credibility in terms of their commitment to human rights and international law, enshrined in several instruments including the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Given Israel’s manifest lack of compliance with Article 2 of the Agreement, in carrying out its genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people, annexing Palestinian territory and entrenching and expanding its violent settler colonial apartheid regime, the EU-Israel Association Agreement should be completely terminated.
It is clear that in the face of blockage and inaction at the EU level, States must legislate domestically to ban the import of settlement services and products into their jurisdictions. As highlighted by Ms Sebaihi, MP, the Bill “will force the European Commission to make progress on this issue.” It is imperative that French MPs act with urgency, to gather a majority to pass the bill to fulfill its objectives in order to protect Palestinian and Syrian people whose very identities are being erased, “pushed out of their land and killed because they seek to defend the place where they have always lived”.