The Israeli Foreign Minister blocked on Wednesday, 16 March 2023 the European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell from visiting the occupation over critical comments.

Borrell voiced concerns on Tuesday over the far-right Israeli government’s planned judicial reform. He also published an article last week, in which he compared Israeli settlers’ attacks in the occupied West Bank to what he claimed to be “Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis.”

He also criticized Israeli military raids that “frequently cause civilian Palestinian deaths, often without effective accountability” as well as “illegal settlements” that are “expanding on occupied land.”.

“There’s no reason to reward him for his conduct,” an official in the foreign ministry was cited saying by Israeli media.

Several EU member states, as well as the UK, denounced the Israeli Knesset’s approval of a bill that will allow Israeli settlers to return to areas across the West Bank that were previously evacuated as part of the 2005 Israeli-known Disengagement Law, which represented the liberation of Gaza and the partial liberation of the West Bank.

On Monday, a joint statement by the UK, France, and other EU countries, urged “Israel” to refrain from “demolishing Palestinian houses in the occupied West Bank and Jerusaelm during the month of Ramadan,” as they referenced the forced expulsion of Palestinian families from the Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah.

The statement noted that the signatories found it “very worrying that Israeli authorities intend to continue” the domicile of Palestinians and declared their “strong opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion policy.”

More than 650,000 colonial settlers were distributed among 164 illegal settlements and 124 outposts built on the stolen lands of occuiped West Bank and Jerusalem. 

The West Bank and Jerusalem lands are occupied territories based on International law due to this all Israeli settlement-building activities there are illegal.