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International Poll Shows Strong Support for Arms, Energy Embargo on Israel
"The people have spoken and they refuse to be complicit," said one campaigner. "Across continents, ordinary citizens demand an end to the fuel that powers settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide."
Aug 07, 2025
Large percentages of people in five nations want arms, fuel, and machinery embargoes on Israel in response to its obliteration and starvation of Gaza, a poll published Thursday revealed.
The survey—which was conducted last month by Pollfish for the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine and endorsed by Progressive International—queried people in Brazil, Colombia, Greece, South Africa, and Spain about whether their governments, fuel companies, weapons makers, and heavy machinery manufacturers should stop, reduce, continue, or increase business with Israel.
Nearly two-thirds of Spanish respondents said they strongly support or support their government taking action "to reduce trade in weapons, fuel, and other relevant goods to pressure Israel to end its military actions in Gaza." In Greece, 63% back an embargo, while 35% oppose it. Sixty percent of Colombians, 58% of South Africans, and 48% of Brazilians strongly or somewhat support punitive sanctions on Israel.
Conversely, 27% of Brazilians said they do not support or strongly oppose an embargo on Israel, while 20% of South Africans, 14% of Colombians and Greeks, and 12% of Spaniards feel the same.
Support for ending or reducing weapons transfers was strong in all five nations, with 76% of Colombian respondents, 75% of Spaniards and Greeks, 66% of South Africans, and 59% of Brazilians favoring such action.
A majority of respondents in all five countries also said that companies providing arms, fuel, or heavy machinery to Israel "should be held responsible for how those products are used in Gaza."
📊 New poll: People across the world say companies selling weapons, fuel, or heavy machinery to Israel should be held accountable for how those products are used in Gaza.🇪🇸 76%🇬🇷 71%🇨🇴 70%🇧🇷 62%🇿🇦 60%#EnergyEmbargoNow #NoFuelForGenocide@progintl.bsky.social
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— Global Energy Embargo For Palestine (@palenergyembargo.bsky.social) August 7, 2025 at 2:33 AM
"The people have spoken and they refuse to be complicit," Global Energy Embargo for Palestine campaigner Ana Sánchez said in a statement.
"Across continents, ordinary citizens demand an end to the fuel that powers settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide," Sánchez added. "No state that claims to uphold democracy can justify maintaining energy, military, or economic ties with Israel while it commits a genocide in Palestine. This is not just about trade; it's about people's power to cut the supply lines of oppression."
The poll was published 670 days into Israel's U.S.-backed assault and siege on Gaza, which has left at least 226,600 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and hundreds of thousands more starving amid increasingly deadly famine as Israel blocks aid from entering the embattled enclave.
The far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—is moving ahead with plans for the "full conquest," reoccupation, and ethnic cleansing of the strip, which U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform into "the Riviera of the Middle East."
Israel's conduct in the war is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations. Among the countries in the survey, Colombia—which severed diplomatic ties with Israel in May 2024—Spain, and Brazil have formally joined or signaled their intent to join South Africa's case.
The ICJ also found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine is an illegal form of apartheid.
"What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinian people is not war, it is genocide," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in February 2024 shortly after recalling his ambassador to Tel Aviv. "If this isn't genocide, I don't know what is."
On Thursday, European Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera—who is Spanish—told Politico, "If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning."
"What we are seeing is a concrete population being targeted, killed, and condemned to starve to death," Ribera said. "A concrete population is confined, with no homes—being destroyed—no food, water, or medicines—being forbidden to access—and subject to bombing and shooting even when they are trying to get humanitarian aid. Any humanity is absent, and no witness[es] are allowed."
Of the surveyed nations, all but Greece support an arms embargo on Israel. The other four countries took part in last month's Hague Group emergency ministerial conference in Colombia, which was organized by Progressive International and ended with the publication of a joint action plan for "coordinated diplomatic, legal, and economic measures to restrain Israel's assault on the occupied Palestinian territories and defend international law at large."
"The message from the peoples of the world is loud and clear: They want action to end the assault on Gaza—not just words," Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler said in a statement accompanying the new survey's publication.
"Across continents, majorities are calling for their governments to halt arms sales and restrain Israel's occupation," Adler added. "That's why states are coming together through the Hague Group to take concrete measures toward accountability. It's time for others to follow their lead."
Meanwhile, a survey published Tuesday by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that 8 in 10 Israeli Jews "are not so troubled or not at all troubled personally" by "the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza."
Eight people, including a child, starved to death in Gaza that day, on which local officials said that more than 80 Palestinians were killed by Israel's bombs, bullets, and blockade.
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Speaker Johnson Calls Illegally Occupied West Bank 'Integral Part' of Israel
"International law is completely unambiguous on this question," said one critic. "What settlers call 'Judea and Samaria' is the legal property of the Palestinians—Israel has zero legal claim to the land."
Aug 04, 2025
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday led a high-level Republican delegation on a visit to the occupied West Bank, where the second-in-line to the U.S. presidency told a rapt audience in an illegal Jewish settler colony that they are the rightful owners of the Palestinian territory.
"The mountains of Judea and Samaria are the rightful property of the Jewish people," Johnson (R-La.) said in Ariel, using the biblical name for the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem. Ariel was built on land stolen from the Palestinian towns of Salfit, Marda, and Iskaka after Israeli forces conquered the West Bank in a 1967 war waged on false pretense of an imminent threat of Egyptian and Syrian attack.
"Judea and Samaria are the front line of the state of Israel and must remain an integral part of it," Johnson added.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned Johnson's visit, calling his endorsement of Israeli annexation a "blatant violation of international law."
"All settlement activity is illegal and void," the ministry stressed, adding that Johnson's stance "undermines Arab and American efforts to stop the war and cycle of violence, while flagrantly contradicting the declared U.S. position on settlements and settler violence."
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at least 1,013 Palestinians, including 214 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 2023. Settlers, often protected and sometimes joined by Israeli troops, have launched numerous deadly pogroms and other attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in what critics say is a bid to finish what Israel started in 1948—the total conquest of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of its Arab population, and Israeli annexation.
Johnson, who is reportedly the highest-ranking American official to visit an Israeli settlement, was accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—who while running for president in 2008 denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—as well as Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), and Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.).
Tenney leads the congressional Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus, which supports Israeli annexation of what it calls the "biblical heartland of Israel."
Last month, all 15 Israeli government ministers from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party urged the prime minister to annex the West Bank. On July 23, members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, voted 71-13 in favor of a symbolic measure declaring "Judea and Samaria" to be "an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people" and asserting that "Israel has the natural, historical, and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel."
Netanyahu has repeatedly displayed maps showing the Middle East without Palestine, all of whose territory is shown as part of Israel. Following U.S President Donald Trump's reelection last November, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist party, said that "the year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
The Israeli government has repeatedly approved construction and expansion of settlements in a bid to establish irreversible "facts on the ground" that will survive developments in international law and moves by an increasing number of nations to formally recognize Palestinian statehood.
Around 150 U.N. member states currently recognize or plan to recognize Palestine. Recently, France became the first Group of Seven member to announce it will officially recognize Palestine. Last week, Canada said it would also do so, with conditions attached, and the United Kingdom threatened recognition of Palestine if Israel does not take "substantive steps" to end its annihilation of Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 200,000 people since October 2023.
Last year, the International Court of Justice—which is also weighing a Gaza genocide case against Israel—found that the occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end as soon as possible. Both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 8(2) the International Criminal Court Rome Statute prohibit settlement activity.
Construction of Ariel began in 1978, the same year the U.S. State Department first adopted the official position that Israeli settlements are "inconsistent with international law." That position stood until then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reversed it during the first Trump administration. Biden-era Secretary of State Antony Blinken restored the long-standing State Department position in 2024.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled support for reverting to the first Trump administration's position, and the State Department has lifted sanctions imposed on some extremist settlers during the Biden administration. Last week, one of those settlers, Yinon Levy, allegedly murdered Palestinian peace activist Awda Hathaleen in Umm al-Kheir after the latter was denied entry into the United States to take part in an interfaith speaking tour.
Approximately 750,000 Israelis currently reside in more than 250 illegal settler colonies in the West Bank. While Israel grants every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, it has refused to allow the approximately five million Palestinian refugees—people ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the foundation of Israel in 1948 and their descendants—to exercise their legal right of return to their homeland.
The Republicans' visit to the West Bank followed last week's tour by Huckabee and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff of a Gaza aid distribution center run by a U.S.-backed group condemned for its role in Israeli forces' massacres of desperate people seeking food and other lifesaving aid—a visit denounced by one critic as a "blatant theatrical display."
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All Likud Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex Entire West Bank This Month
The 15 ministers said that Israel's "strategic partnership, backing, and support of the U.S. and President Donald Trump" make this a "propitious time" to formally steal most of Palestine.
Jul 02, 2025
All 15 Israeli government ministers representing Likud on Wednesday urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who leads the right-wing party—to annex the entire West Bank of Palestine before the end of the Knesset's summer session on July 27, citing support from U.S. President Donald Trump.
The ministers, along with Likud Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, sent a letter to Netanyahu asserting that "this is the time to approve in government a decision to apply sovereignty" over Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem.
"Following the state of Israel's historic achievements in the face of Iran's Axis of Evil and its sympathizers, the task must be completed and the existential threat from within must be eliminated, to prevent another massacre in the heart of the country," the letter argues, referring to the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, in which the United States intervened by bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
"The strategic partnership, backing, and support of the U.S. and President Donald Trump have made it a propitious time to move forward with it now, and ensure Israel's security for generations," the ministers said. "The October 7 massacre proved that the doctrine of settlement blocs and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the remaining territory is an existential danger to Israel. It's time for sovereignty."
Asked during a Wednesday press briefing for reaction on the ministers' call to annex the West Bank, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce replied, "I think that is specifically something that the White House would be able to answer for you, but I also know that our position regarding Israel... is that we stand with Israel and its decisions and how it views its own internal security."
Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington, D.C. next week to meet with Trump, despite an International Criminal Court warrant for the Israeli leader's arrest for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and forced starvation.
I asked State Dept spox Bruce about Israeli minister’s call to annex the occupied West Bank — she referred me to the WH, saying the US "stand with Israel and its decisions.”
I followed up asking if the two-state solution remains US policy, she said Trump is “realistic… Gaza is… pic.twitter.com/GdtN0tTDdy
— Rabia İclal Turan (@iclalturan) July 2, 2025
Palestinians and their defenders warned during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle that a victoriousTrump might lift the few guardrails the Biden administration had placed on Israel and unleash Netanyahu to seize all of Palestine. The goal of Israel's far right is expansion of Israeli territory to include what proponents call "Greater Israel," which is based on biblical boundaries that stretched from Africa to Turkey to Mesopotamia.
Netanyahu has repeatedly displayed maps showing the Middle East without Palestine, all of whose territory is shown as part of Israel. However, annexation had previously been most closely associated with far-right figures outside Likud like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of Jewish Power.
Following Trump's reelection last November, Smotrich said that "the year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
"The only way to remove the threat of a Palestinian state from the agenda is to apply Israeli sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria," he continued. "I have no doubt that President Trump, who showed courage and determination in his decisions during his first term, will support the state of Israel in this move."
Smotrich praised Wednesday's letter, declaring he'll be ready to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank as soon as Netanyahu "gives the order," according to The Times of Israel.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin, one of the Likud members who signed the letter, said Wednesday: "I think that this period, beyond the current issues, is a time of historic opportunity that we must not miss. The time for sovereignty has come, the time to apply sovereignty. My position on this matter is firm, it is clear."
Israel occupied the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai but unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in 1980 while keeping control of the rest of the West Bank and Golan Heights. Although Israel dismantled settlements and withdrew troops from Gaza in 2005, it is still considered an occupier under international law and its conduct during the current invasion, bombardment, and siege of the coastal enclave is the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case.
Since 1967, Israel has steadily seized more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank while building and expanding Jewish-only settlements there. Settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to around 770,000 today. Settlers often attack Palestinians and their property, including in deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into leaving so their land can be stolen. In recent weeks, Israeli settlers have attacked Israel Defense Forces soldiers they view as standing in their way and Palestinians alike in the West Bank.
From 1978 until new guidelines were announced by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the first Trump administration, the U.S. State Department also considered Israel's settlements to be "inconsistent with international law."
In July 2024, the ICJ found Israel's occupation of Palestine to be an illegal form of apartheid that must be ended as soon as possible. The tribunal also said that Israeli settler colonization of the West Bank amounts to annexation, also a crime under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
As the world's attention is focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed upward of 950 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 2023, including at least 200 children, while wounding thousands more, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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