French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said they will hold telephone talks with US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday evening, AFP reports.

“Germany and France support the Israeli people in these tragic moments,” Emmanuel Macron said after arriving in Germany. Together with him, Olaf Scholz insisted on the need to prevent “deflagration in the region.”

The European Commission announced on Monday that it will review its entire €691 million aid portfolio to the Palestinians and immediately suspend all payments following the Hamas attack on Israel.

“The scale of terror and brutality against Israel and its citizens is a watershed moment,” Oliver Varhely, the European Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement, said in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Monday afternoon.

The European Union intended to spend around 1.2 billion euros between 2021 and 2024 to finance projects, especially in education or health. A representative of the Commission stressed on Monday that the EU does not finance “directly or indirectly” Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and is considered a terrorist organization in the European Union.

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European countries are reviewing financial support for the Palestinians

German Development Minister Svenja Schulze, for her part, said that the government in Berlin always carefully monitors that the money is used only for peaceful purposes. “But these attacks on Israel mark a terrible turning point,” she said. “We will now review all our commitments regarding the Palestinian territories,” the minister added.

Chancellor Scholz also announced that he would hold talks with Egyptian, American, French and British leaders, stressing the importance of preventing the Palestinian group Hamas’ attack on Israel from turning into “a conflagration with unpredictable consequences for the entire region.”

Some German parliamentarians, especially the opposition Christian Democrats, called for an end to the aid.

“The whole European Union, all 27 states, must say now: we need a new start and we will no longer finance terrorists,” said Armin Laschet, the Conservative candidate in the last federal election, demanding an end to cooperation with the EU. with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in the West Bank.

The Austrian government also announced on Monday that it was suspending payments for humanitarian aid projects in the Palestinian territories, saying they amounted to around 19 million euros.

“The scale of this terror is so terrible that we cannot go back to normal work. Therefore, we will temporarily freeze all payments to Austria in the field of development,” said Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg on ORF radio.

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