The United Kingdom has announced a ban on the import of all goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in Parliament on Tuesday. It comes in response to an intensifying wave of Israeli settler pogroms and settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The ban, set to come into effect within six to nine months, would target settlement exports such as dates, olive oil and agricultural products, with Miliband saying he did not believe “the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops”. The International Court of Justice in July 2024 called Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory “unlawful”.
Months later, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for an end to the Israeli occupation within a year. Israel’s response was furious, as it announced four “counter-measures”, including banning 12 British MPs from entering Israel and closing the British consulate in Jerusalem. After Miliband’s speech, 11 more countries: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, shared a joint statement supporting the so-called two-state solution and announcing their own intentions to impose restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. Spain and Ireland had already announced their own national bans earlier this year, alongside the Netherlands and Belgium.
Aside from Canada and the UK, the rest of the countries considering or already banning settlement goods are European Union members. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 31.7 percent of Israel’s total trade in goods in 2025 (43.3 billion euros, or $50.4bn), according to the European Commission. The EU supplied 33.1 percent of Israel’s imports (28 billion euros, or $32.6bn) and received 29.4 percent of Israel’s exports (15.3 billion euros or $17.8bn). Israel is the EU’s 27th largest trade partner, with Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany being its biggest individual trade partners.
According to a 2026 report by Global Echo Litigation Center, a Palestinian rights legal advocacy group, roughly 5,900 shipments from Israel were headed to Europe, with more than 17 percent containing products originating from settlements. While no specific figures for settlement trade alone are known, it is understood to be a tiny fraction of total EU-Israel trade, meaning the ban’s impact is much more symbolic than economic. The table below shows each country’s total trade with Israel for the European countries that have banned, or are introducing bans on, illegal Israeli settlement goods. The top five European trading partners with Israel either enforcing or set to introduce settlement bans are Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, France and Spain.
Ireland-Israel bilateral trade totalled $5.36bn in 2025. Ireland is Israel’s second-largest export market for goods after the United States, driven largely by tech, particularly semiconductors and integrated circuits. Netherlands-Israel bilateral trade totalled roughly $4.8bn in 2025. The Netherlands is also Israel’s largest single foreign investor, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all EU investment in the country.
According to UN Comtrade, UK-Israel bilateral trade totalled $3.73bn in 2025. An Al Jazeera investigation found at least 17 companies linked to illegal Israeli settlements hold more than 2.1 billion pounds ($2.85bn) in UK public-sector contracts. France-Israel bilateral trade totalled $3.62bn in 2025. A large part of France’s trade with Israel constitutes export licences for surveillance and military technologies.
Spain-Israel bilateral trade totalled $2.79bn in 2025. In September that year, Spain banned the import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, as well as the trade of arms. Israeli settlements are Jewish-only communities built illegally on Palestinian land. Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies.
Illegal Israeli settlements continue to grow, decades after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which established limited Palestinian self-rule and were meant to lead to a permanent peace settlement. At the time, about 270,000 settlers lived across the occupied territory. Today, that figure has more than doubled to between 600,000 and 750,000 people, about 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, living across some 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
