Former French and British Dipl Urge Paris and London to Sanction Israel Together
One hundred and two former French and British diplomats signed an open letter published on August 22, 2026 by Le Monde, calling on France and the United Kingdom to jointly sanction Israel over its policies in occupied Palestinian territory. The letter, titled "France and the UK should act together to uphold international law in Palestine," urges the two governments to suspend EU-Israel and UK-Israel trade agreements, halt arms transfers and all bilateral military cooperation with Israel, ban trade with Israeli settlements, prohibit citizens from purchasing property on occupied Palestinian land, and guarantee humanitarian access to Gaza through UNRWA and other UN agencies (Al Jazeera).
The signatories include former British ambassadors to the United Nations Jeremy Greenstock and Emyr Jones Parry, and former French Middle East directors Yves Aubin de la Messuzière and Denis Bauchard. Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Iran, Qatar and Yemen, also signed and spoke to Al Jazeera about the initiative (Al Jazeera).
The letter frames the two countries' responsibility as rooted in the League of Nations mandates they held over Palestine, Syria and Lebanon after World War I. In simple terms, the mandate system gave France and Britain administrative authority over these territories after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the signatories argue that this history creates a special obligation to act now. France and the UK both recognised a Palestinian state in 2025, a move the signatories treat as the starting point for stronger enforcement action rather than a diplomatic endpoint. The letter urges the two governments to push for "equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians" and characterises Palestinian house demolitions and settler violence as amounting to "ethnic cleansing" (Al Jazeera).
On the Palestinian side, the letter describes the current leadership as "unrepresentative and dysfunctional" and calls on it to keep the recognised state "democratic and law-abiding," pointing to elections scheduled for November (Al Jazeera).
The appeal lands against a backdrop of escalating European pressure on Israel that has so far produced limited collective action at the EU level. In June 2026, France and allied countries considered national measures to pressure Israel over the West Bank after efforts to advance tougher measures through the European Union were blocked (Reuters). On June 9, 2026, Britain, Canada, France and Norway announced coordinated sanctions targeting Israeli networks involved in financing settler violence in the West Bank (Reuters). More recently, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on August 19, 2026 that West Bank settler violence against Palestinians justifies France's sanctions against an Israeli minister (Reuters).
The letter also fits a broader pattern of former European officials publicly pressing their governments to act. In April 2026, 390 European former ministers and officials wrote that Israel is breaking the EU-Israel Association Agreement and called for the suspension of arms transfers (Financial Times). A year earlier, CEPS published an open letter signed by 110 former EU ambassadors and senior staff and 99 former ambassadors from France, Germany and Italy demanding immediate implementation of EU measures against Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank (CEPS). French President Emmanuel Macron said in October 2024 that sales of arms used in Gaza should be halted, a call Israel described as "a disgrace" and as an arms embargo (Reuters).
On the ground, the toll continues to mount. Al Jazeera reports that Israel's war on Gaza has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023. A ceasefire took effect in October 2025, and Israeli attacks since then have killed at least 1,285 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health (Al Jazeera).
The broader context here is a widening gap between European rhetorical positions on international law in the occupied territories and the concrete leverage governments have been willing to exercise. France and the UK's 2025 recognition of a Palestinian state established a legal and diplomatic baseline that former officials are now using to argue for enforcement mechanisms, including trade suspension and arms embargoes, that no European government has yet been willing to impose unilaterally. Think of it as the difference between acknowledging a rule exists and actually penalising someone for breaking it. The letter's framing around the post-World War I mandates is a deliberate invocation of historical obligation, intended to make inaction by Paris and London a question of legacy as much as policy.
What distinguishes this letter from prior European diplomatic appeals is its bilateral framing. Previous open letters have addressed the EU collectively or individual governments. This one targets two specific states with shared mandate histories and, since 2025, shared recognition of Palestinian statehood, asking them to act in concert. Whether Paris and London treat that as a sufficient basis for coordinated sanctions, or file it alongside the accumulating stack of former-official appeals, will indicate how far the gap between recognition and enforcement is willing to close.
