The EU Is Secretly Negotiating To Hand All Your Data To Israel

Good day, Aontacht readers,

I have both read and written a load of stories about the European Union's moral bankruptcy over the years but this one really was calling out for its own article. This one is the kind of story that should be on the front page of every newspaper in Europe but is instead buried in the investigative output of ‘Statewatch’, read by the people who already know the EU is rotten and ignored by everyone else, specifically those whose job it is to hold it to account.

But it will not be ignored by us.

So I’ll get right to it: The European Commission has been secretly negotiating an agreement with Israel's police service that would allow the wholesale transfer of sensitive personal data from EU systems to Israeli authorities, covering biometric information, genetic data, location tracking, political opinions, and more. The agreement would operate through Europol, the EU's policing agency, and the data could be accessed by Israel's National Police and internal security service, Shin Bet. It is a massive expansion of a 2018 arrangement that explicitly excluded personal data sharing and explicitly excluded the occupied Palestinian territories. This version includes both.

The EU's own legal service declared the agreement unlawful in 2022. The Council Legal Service concluded that the Commission had breached its negotiating mandate, violated EU treaty requirements, and failed to consult the relevant working group. The lawyers specifically objected to provisions that would allow data shared with Israel to be used in the occupied Palestinian territories, warning it would be the first time an international agreement between the EU and Israel would provide for its application to the territories occupied since 1967, and that it would violate the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and breach international law. The Commission read all of this, noted it, and continued negotiating anyway.

Clandestine Negotiations

The agreement was formally frozen in late 2022 following the legal objections. What Statewatch's investigation reveals is that it did not stay frozen. Commission officials held at least seven meetings with Israeli diplomats between January 2023 and January 2026, including one with Israel's then-foreign minister Eli Cohen in April 2023. When Statewatch asked the Commission about the current status of the negotiations, it refused to comment. When asked whether it had prepared a revised draft addressing the legal objections, it declined to answer. The Israeli embassy, foreign ministry, and police also declined to respond. Europol, for its part, described itself as a 'passive observer' in the negotiations while simultaneously hosting at least five Israeli delegations between August 2024 and March 2026, with meetings facilitated by Israel's liaison officer to Europol and culminating in a visit from the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands to Europol's headquarters in The Hague in March of this year.

This is what secrecy looks like in the real world. Not a dark, locked room and a signed non-disclosure agreement, but a slow accumulation of meetings, facilitated visits, and refused comments, conducted just below the threshold of public attention, in the reasonable expectation that nobody will look too closely and nobody who does will be given anything to work with. The Commission has been negotiating to hand your data to a state committing a genocide right now, in defiance of its own lawyers, in secret, away from parliamentary oversight, for the better part of three years.

The human rights implications are not abstract. Eitan Diamond, head of Diakonia's International Humanitarian Law Centre in Jerusalem, was direct about what the agreement would mean in practice: 'The data transferred via the agreement could be used as intelligence to support decisions to attack and kill Palestinians. The EU would run the risk of arbitrarily depriving people of their freedom and subjecting them to systematic ill-treatment under hellish conditions in detention.' Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani put it more bluntly and far more accurately:

'The intended cooperation is rooted in the racist colonial mentality of Europe, and turns against us Palestinians, the victims of genocide.'

Douwe Korff, a legal scholar at Yale University, described it as deeply concerning that the Commission appeared to be moving towards sharing sensitive data about people across the EU, including all their communications with aid workers, officials, and journalists in Israel and the occupied territories, with a state that has carried out targeted killings of children, aid workers, and journalists on an unprecedented scale and is credibly accused of genocide.

The Double Scandal

The ICJ's July 2024 advisory opinion made the legal position even clearer, concluding that Israel must end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as rapidly as possible, and that all states and international organisations must avoid any action that could help maintain that unlawful presence. The proposed agreement would do precisely the opposite, enabling Israeli security forces to operate more effectively across the occupied territories using data provided by European institutions. The Commission has known this. It has continued negotiating regardless.

In July 2026, twenty-seven MEPs finally submitted written questions about the negotiations. Mounir Satouri, a French Green MEP, described it to Statewatch as a double scandal: firstly , that the Commission had negotiated a police cooperation agreement with Israel while its own European External Action Service was documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza; and second, that it had done so in the utmost secrecy, shielded from parliamentary scrutiny.

'The Commission has disgraced itself by conducting them,' he said. Spanish MEP Hana Muro Jalloul added: 'Security is important, as is the fight against terrorism and serious crimes covered by the agreement. But that does not exempt us from complying with the law. In Europe, we don't use the security argument to violate the law.'

We should probably let that last line hang in the air for a moment, because it describes something the Commission has seemingly decided it is entirely comfortable with doing.

This is the same European Union that lectures the world about human rights and the rules-based international order, that imposes sanctions on Russia within hours of any provocation, that presents itself as the gold standard of democratic governance and legal accountability. It has been secretly negotiating to hand your biometric data, your genetic data, your political opinions, to a state its own lawyers said it could not legally share data with, in territories the ICJ has ruled it must not entrench the occupation of, during a genocide that its own External Action Service was documenting in real time. The Commission ignored its lawyers. It ignored the ICJ. It ignored its parliament. It kept meeting, kept negotiating, kept refusing to comment, and hoped nobody would notice.

Statewatch noticed. Now you have too.

And on that thought, I’ll let you go.

This article was originally published in The Spectacle.