Barcelona’s city council voted on Friday to cut ties with Israel and suspend its friendship agreement with the city of Tel Aviv over the country’s recent military actions against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The motion, backed by the governing Socialists’ Party of Catalonia along with other far-left groups, calls for an end to all ties with the Jewish state until what it described as “respect for international law” and the “basic rights of the Palestinian people” are restored by Israel’s government.
The city will also suspend its 1998 friendship agreement with Tel Aviv-Jaffa, while urging the Port of Barcelona and trade show organizer Fira de Barcelona not to host Israeli pavilions or companies involved in weapons trade or profiting from the war against Hamas.
“The suffering and death in Gaza over the past year and a half, and recent attacks by the Israeli government, make any relationship unviable,” Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, told the council, according to Agence France-Presse.
Barcelona also moved to suspend relations with the Jewish state in February 2023. The move, by Collboni’s predecessor, Ada Colau, was reversed after he won local elections some four months later.
Tel Aviv represents “the best of Israel’s progressive values,” Collboni declared when he announced his decision September 2023, emphasizing that Barcelona’s commitment to the Palestinian remained “unequivocal.”
Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez asked European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to increase pressure on Jerusalem to halt the “illegal” Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza.
Sánchez, according to local reports, told von der Leyen that Brussels should “increase pressure on Israel to stop its illegal invasion both by suspending the E.U.-Israel Association Agreement and through the implementation of sanctions, including an embargo on arms sales.”
