Barcelona City Council voted Friday to sever institutional ties with the “Israeli” government and suspend its friendship agreement with Tel Aviv, citing violations of international law and the need to uphold the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
The motion, which includes nearly 20 provisions, was backed by the ruling Socialist party in the city as well as various leftist and pro-independence parties.
Barcelona will also suspend a 1998 friendship agreement with Tel Aviv, and it urged the trade fair organizer Fira de Barcelona not to host Israeli government pavilions or companies involved in the arms trade or profiting from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Among other measures in the resolution — some of which fall outside the council’s direct authority — the City Council urged the board of the Barcelona Trade Fair not to host “Israeli” government pavilions or “arms companies or any other sector that profits from genocide, occupation, apartheid, and colonialism against the Palestinian people.”
A similar recommendation was made to the Port of Barcelona.
Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni said the “level of suffering and death witnessed in Gaza over the past year and a half, along with the repeated attacks carried out by the Israeli government in recent weeks… make any relationship between the two cities unsustainable.”
It is not the first time Barcelona has moved to suspend ties with “Israel”. In February 2023, then-mayor Ada Colau cut ties with the twin city, Tel Aviv, due to Israel’s apartheid policy towards Palestinians.
On 28 May, 2024, the Spanish government approved the decision to officially recognise the State of Palestine alongside Norway and Ireland. Since then, Spain has become one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu within the European Union in recent months.
These decisions come amid “Israel”’s ongoing war on Gaza, which senior Spanish officials—including Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez—have explicitly condemned as genocide.
