Ireland says it 'will not wait' for EU to suspend free trade agreement with Israel

Ireland will move forward with restricting trade with Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territories and will not wait for the rest of Europe to suspend the free trade agreement, its taoiseach said on Tuesday.

Ireland, which alongside Spain is one of the bloc's fiercest critics of Israel's brutal military campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, previously said it would seek legal advice on whether it can review its trade ties with Israel unilaterally.

The EU-Israel Association Agreement is a legal agreement that sets out the political and economic relations between the two entities. A suspension will also halt trade with Israeli products coming from the occupied West Bank.

"Ireland now, in the context of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] advisory opinion of July, will not wait for everybody in Europe to move on the issue of trade in the occupied Palestinian territories," Taoiseach Simon Harris told reporters in Brussels.

"We want to see if it is now possible to move ahead in terms of trade restrictions, in terms of the occupied Palestinian territories, in light of the obligation that the ICJ Advisory Opinion places on all of us to do everything we can to end what is an illegal and unlawful occupation."

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Monday urged other members of the European Union to respond to Madrid and Ireland's request to suspend the bloc's free trade agreement with Israel over its actions in Gaza and Lebanon.

For months, both Madrid and Dublin have been in talks with other EU members who want a review of the agreement on the basis that Israel may be breaching the agreement's human rights clause.

The agreement allows for trade restrictions if human rights are violated. Israel has objected to a meeting to discuss this and suggested reviewing the whole deal in the latter half of the year.

The nations asked the EU Commission in February to review it over Israel's war on Gaza and the potential violations of international law in light of the United Nations General Assembly's resolution and the International Court of Justice's ruling.

"The European Commission must respond once and for all to the formal request made by two European countries to suspend the association agreement with Israel if it is found, as everything suggests, that human rights are being violated," Sánchez said on Monday.

Spain and Ireland have been vocal supporters of a Palestinian state, being considered the most critical of Israel among EU states. With Norway, the three nations officially recognised Palestinian statehood in May, much to the anger of Israel.

Most recently, Spain has been calling on the international community to stop selling arms to Israel as he condemned the state's attack against United Nations' peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

(Reuters contributed to this article)