EU squabbles over ‘pause’ in Gaza conflict in bid to supply aid

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Good morning. A scoop to start: Some EU countries reckon the Commission has overlooked up to 16bn of unspent budget funds, rebuffing Brussels’ demands for a top-up to be discussed by leaders today.

Today, I explain why EU capitals are arguing over a “pause”, “pauses” or “windows” in the conflict in Gaza, and our ECB supremo reports from Athens on this week’s historic bank meeting in Greece’s capital.

Word war

As war rages in Gaza and Israel, the EU’s 27 leaders will spend part of today squabbling over whether to call on Israel and Hamas to implement a “humanitarian pause”, “humanitarian pauses”, or “humanitarian windows” in the fighting, in a statement to be issued after today’s summit.

Context: The EU has agreed a joint statement on the conflict, condemning Hamas’s October 7 terror attack and affirming Israel’s right to self-defence within international law. But that masks differences between member states regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Over the past 36 hours, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli air strikes, while Hamas has continued to fire dozens of rockets at Israel. During that time, various drafts of the summit conclusions seen by the FT have featured singular, plural, and caveated “pauses.” The word “ceasefire” has not featured.

The linguistic gymnastics are to win over all 27 leaders, any one of whom can veto the entire text.

“Letters, commas, language matters, and that is how you find agreement,” said one senior EU official involved in the negotiations.

“From our perspective, what matters is humanitarian access, so we can help those in need, whether in Israel or Gaza,” the official said. “Pause, or pauses . . . Words matter as long as they help us to reach our objectives.”

The UN’s Palestinian relief agency said yesterday it would likely run out of fuel this morning, used to power life-saving equipment in Gaza’s hospitals and operate its water system.

“On plural or singular, to be honest I don’t think it really matters. Because whether it’s ‘pauses’ or’ pause’, it is clear what the intention is, to get petrol and goods to the people in Gaza,” said a senior EU diplomat.

Much depends on Germany, the EU’s most powerful member state, and its strongest supporter of Israel. Yesterday evening Berlin was still pushing for “windows”.

“We want to ensure that a permanent and safe access into the Gaza Strip is made possible. And for that we need humanitarian windows . . . restricted in spatial and time terms, in which there is no shooting,” said Sebastian Fischer, Germany’s foreign ministry spokesman.

While Brussels fights over words, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night said he was “preparing a ground invasion . . . Above ground, underground, in Gaza and outside Gaza.”

That will probably be harder to pause.

Chart du jour: The other frontline

Kyiv’s counteroffensive has not produced the results it had hoped for this year. Meanwhile Ukraine’s doctors, nurses and paramedics wage a daily battle to save the lives of their country’s defenders.

Road-trip

Christine Lagarde has taken the European Central Bank to Athens this week for its annual trip, marking a historical occasion for the eurozone’s rate-setters, their president and Greece itself, writes Martin Arnold.

Context: The ECB is today expected to leave interest rates unchanged for the first time in 15 months after an unprecedented 10 consecutive increases in borrowing costs, as it assesses whether it has done enough to tame the biggest surge in inflation for a generation.

The meeting has a personal resonance for Lagarde. As then-head of the IMF, she received death threats after accusing the Greeks of not paying their taxes at the height of the country’s debt crisis. She also helped to design brutal austerity measures as part of the country’s bailout a decade ago.

This week’s ECB meeting in Athens — its first since 2008 — also underlines how Greece has gone from Europe’s Achilles heel to one of the region’s best-performing economies.

The ECB president emphasised this in a speech at the Bank of Greece yesterday evening, saying the bailout reforms “took an exceptionally heavy toll” but “the country’s resilience has been remarkable”. 

“It is not only the economy that has been resilient — it is also the Greek people,” Lagarde said. “There were times when they could have chosen a different path.”

Greece recently regained its investment-grade credit rating, and its gross domestic product grew by 2.7 per cent in the year to June, the highest in the EU apart from Malta.

The country’s debt is still the largest of any EU country at 171 per cent of GDP last year. But it is expected to fall to 152 per cent next year, helped by growth and fiscal prudence: Athens is one of the few European capitals generating a budget surplus.

What to watch today

1. EU leaders meet in Brussels.

2. Palestinian foreign minister Riad Malki meets officials from the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

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