In a seven-page memo, Frank Hoffmeister, the director of the EU foreign service’s legal department, argued that while European law required the labeling of settlement products, a ban on their import and sale was still up for debate.

Hoffmeister, the EU legal note’s author, is also the Brussels-based director for the foreign and security policy working group of Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party, which is a strong supporter of Israel’s war in Gaza. The FDP, for which Hoffmeister previously served as Brussels vice chair, has called for a freeze on EU and German payments to Palestinian institutions and programs until a special audit has ensured that no cash goes “to finance Islamist terror.”

Between 2020 and August 2023, European investors put up an estimated $164.2 billion of loans and guarantees for businesses “actively involved” in Israeli settlements — and held $144.7 billion of shares and bonds in the same firms, according to an estimate from a coalition of groups opposing European investment in settlements.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, told The Intercept that the EU’s attitude to the ICJ opinion was “legally flawed, politically damaging, and morally compromised.”