Israel expels Dutch officials from the Gaza coordination centre

Israel has ordered the Netherlands' representatives out of the international centre that coordinates the Gaza ceasefire, in response to a Dutch decision to bar imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

Gideon Saar, Israel's foreign minister, announced the move in a post on X. The delegation would be removed at once from the International Support Center for Gaza at Kiryat Gat, in southern Israel, he wrote, and had a week to leave the country. He said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approved the step.

Saar presented the expulsion as a reply to a run of decisions in The Hague that he characterised as "anti-Israel moves", and tied those to what he said was a rise in antisemitism and boycotts in the Netherlands.

"Whoever acts against Israel will have no foothold in the region," Saar wrote, adding that measures taken against the country would not go unanswered. No public response from the Dutch government had been reported.

The Dutch measure, announced in late July, covers goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It is due to take effect on 22 September.

The centre at Kiryat Gat was established by US Central Command to oversee how the Gaza ceasefire is carried out and to monitor the American peace plan that followed it. Around 40 countries and organisations take part.

What the expulsion does is join two things that had been separate. The centre exists to move aid and watch a truce hold; the import ban is a trade decision about settlements, taken in a European capital and directed at the occupied territories rather than at Israel proper. Making a seat at the first conditional on silence over the second sets a price for participation — and the governments most likely to act on settlements are the ones whose place in the mechanism is now least secure.