Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp resigned on Friday after failing to push through sanctions on Israel during a Cabinet meeting.
“I see that I am insufficiently able to take meaningful additional measures to increase pressure on Israel,” he was cited as saying by Dutch news agency ANP, following a Cabinet debate that ended in stalemate.
On Thursday, Veldkamp said that he lacked confidence in his ability in the coming weeks and months to implement additional policies against Israel, after having declared Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich persona non grata in the Netherlands on July 28.
“I feel constrained in setting the course I consider necessary as foreign minister,” AFP quoted him as saying.
The report added that Veldkamp encountered “resistance” in several Cabinet meetings with regard to his proposals.
According to local media, Veldkamp also wanted to advance a boycott on products made by Jews in Judea and Samaria. Cabinet members argued that such a boycott should only be introduced at the European level, while some flatly rejected new measures, the report added.
Following Veldkamp’s lead, four other ministers from his New Social Contract (NSC) party handed in their resignations, leaving the centrist People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the Farmer-Citizen Movement as the only members of the caretaker government.
In a joint declaration on Thursday, the Netherlands and 20 other countries decried Israel’s approval of a major housing project in Judea.
The move was “unacceptable and contrary to international law,” the statement read.
Earlier this month, the European nation decided not to recognize a Palestinian state for the time being, while at the same time blasting Israel for not conducting a “just war” against the Hamas terrorist organization.
The Dutch House of Representatives in The Hague held an emergency debate on Thursday and Friday, with lawmakers recalled from their summer recess to deliberate the situation in Gaza.
With France and Britain announcing they will recognize a Palestinian state in September unless the war in Gaza comes to an end, Veldkamp told MPs that the Netherlands would not do the same “at this time.”
Meanwhile, a resolution sponsored by the Party for Freedom (PVV)—led by pro-Israel politician Geert Wilders—saying that Hamas must be completely destroyed, was recently adopted by the Dutch House of Representatives.
Wilders posted a document in Dutch on X, dated Aug. 21, which read, “Having heard the deliberation, [the House] declares that the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas must be completely destroyed, and proceeds to the order of the day.”
The Dutch government collapsed on June 3, ushering in an Oct. 29 snap election, after Wilders’s Party for Freedom withdrew from the coalition after others failed to back his plans to toughen immigration policies.
The Party for Freedom had entered the coalition some six months after its surprise victory in the Netherlands’ November 2023 general election, striking a deal with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and New Social Contract parties, as well as the Farmer-Citizen Movement.
Initially described as the most pro-Israel government in the history of the Netherlands due to its promise to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Veldkamp became the E.U.'s most vocal critic of the Jewish state.
In November, Veldkamp welcomed his Iranian counterpart in The Hague, just days after his government said it would break off all “non-essential” contacts with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
