What Britain and the EU May Discuss at Monday Summit

A fan of Britain poses outside the venue for the grand final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Basel, Switzerland, 17 May 2025. (EPA)
A fan of Britain poses outside the venue for the grand final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Basel, Switzerland, 17 May 2025. (EPA)
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What Britain and the EU May Discuss at Monday Summit

A fan of Britain poses outside the venue for the grand final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Basel, Switzerland, 17 May 2025. (EPA)
A fan of Britain poses outside the venue for the grand final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Basel, Switzerland, 17 May 2025. (EPA)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will welcome European Union leaders to London on Monday to help reset relations with the bloc, with both sides aiming to secure progress in some specific areas while other issues will remain off-limits.

Below is a list of issues that could be discussed.

DEFENSE AND SECURITY PACT

Britain's Labour government wants to pursue a defense and security pact that previous Conservative governments opted not to seek when Brexit was first negotiated.

Both sides agree it is imperative for Europe to work more closely together on defense, given Russia's invasion of Ukraine and calls by US President Donald Trump for NATO's European members to shoulder more of the burden of the alliance.

Britain could try to negotiate access for UK companies to joint defense projects under Security Action For Europe - an EU loan scheme worth 150 billion euros ($168 billion) - and how much it will have to pay for that access. This could also facilitate greater foreign policy co-ordination.

But such an agreement may be contingent on other areas such as fish.

SANITARY AND PHYTOSANITARY

Labor has positioned a veterinary agreement with the EU that is aimed at preventing unnecessary border checks as central to its planned EU reset.

Any deal would maintain high food standards, which Britain also insisted were not lowered in its discussions with the US to remove tariffs.

The EU is likely to ask Britain for dynamic alignment with its sanitary and phytosanitary rules and a role for the European Court of Justice, which Starmer could agree to, according to think tank UK in a Changing Europe.

The more likely scenario at this summit is that both sides agree on a future framework for negotiations, rather than reach a final agreement.

MOBILITY

A youth mobility scheme to make it easier for under-30s to travel and work between Britain and the EU is a priority for the bloc.

Starmer's government has said this will not be a return to freedom of movement, but to a controlled amount of people, with a likely limit on how many can use it and how long they can stay. Campaign group Best for Britain said two-thirds of Britons support a scheme with a two-year limit.

British participation in the Erasmus+ student exchange program could also be discussed in future.

And Britain is hoping to secure access to faster e-gates at EU airports for British travelers.

FISHERIES

Provisions covering fishing and energy are due to expire in 2026, and need to be extended or renegotiated over the next year.

The post-Brexit trade agreement transferred existing quotas to the bloc for a transition period, after which they would be negotiated on an annual or multi-annual basis.

EU diplomats have said that a fisheries deal should be the same length as any agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary measures, to ensure equal leverage during any renegotiations, while France is pushing for any defense deal to be contingent on a fisheries agreement.

Fishing has long been a source of tension. The EU has taken Britain to court over its ban of fishing for sand eels in UK waters.

ELECTRICITY

Britain left the EU's internal energy market after Brexit, but the UK's energy industry is pushing for more efficient and closer electricity trading arrangements with the bloc.

Britain imported around 14% of its electricity in 2024, a record high, through power links with Belgium, Denmark, France and Norway.

CARBON MARKETS

Many EU and British businesses have called for the EU and UK carbon markets to be linked. They already collaborate on charging power plants and other industrial entities for their carbon emissions to reach climate targets.

Industry analysts have said linking the two carbon markets would likely drive up UK prices, which are lower than the EU, to EU levels.

But energy firms say it will save costs for consumers, improve market liquidity, and help Britain to avoid penalties under Europe's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which from 2026 will impose fees on EU imports of steel, cement, aluminium, fertilizers, electricity and hydrogen.

OTHER AREAS

The mutual recognition of certain professional qualifications, changes to ease travel for touring artists, and data-sharing are all areas where Britain and the EU may seek to pursue future agreement.



UN Warns of Deadly Aid Crisis in Gaza amid Looting and Israeli Restrictions

 Palestinians leave a food distribution point run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) group with bags and wooden pallets, near the Netsarim corridor in the central Gaza Strip on August 3, 2025. (AFP)
Palestinians leave a food distribution point run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) group with bags and wooden pallets, near the Netsarim corridor in the central Gaza Strip on August 3, 2025. (AFP)
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UN Warns of Deadly Aid Crisis in Gaza amid Looting and Israeli Restrictions

 Palestinians leave a food distribution point run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) group with bags and wooden pallets, near the Netsarim corridor in the central Gaza Strip on August 3, 2025. (AFP)
Palestinians leave a food distribution point run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) group with bags and wooden pallets, near the Netsarim corridor in the central Gaza Strip on August 3, 2025. (AFP)

The trickle of food aid Israel allows to enter Gaza after nearly 22 months of war is seized by Palestinians risking their lives under fire, looted by gangs or diverted in chaotic circumstances rather than reaching those most in need, UN agencies, aid groups and analysts say.

After images of malnourished children stoked an international outcry, aid has started to be delivered to the territory once more but on a scale deemed woefully insufficient by international organizations.

Every day, AFP correspondents on the ground see desperate crowds rushing towards food convoys or the sites of aid drops by Arab and European air forces.

On Thursday, in Al-Zawayda in central Gaza, emaciated Palestinians rushed to pallets parachuted from a plane, jostling and tearing packages from each other in a cloud of dust.

“Hunger has driven people to turn on each other. People are fighting each other with knives,” Amir Zaqot, who came seeking aid, told AFP.

To avoid disturbances, World Food Program (WFP) drivers have been instructed to stop before their intended destination and let people help themselves. But to no avail.

“A truck wheel almost crushed my head, and I was injured retrieving the bag,” sighed a man, carrying a bag of flour on his head, in the Zikim area, in the northern Gaza Strip.

- ‘Truly tragic’ -

Mohammad Abu Taha went at dawn to a distribution site near Rafah in the south to join the queue and reserve his spot. He said there were already “thousands waiting, all hungry, for a bag of flour or a little rice and lentils.”

“Suddenly, we heard gunshots..... There was no way to escape. People started running, pushing and shoving each other, children, women, the elderly,” said the 42-year-old.

“The scene was truly tragic: blood everywhere, wounded, dead.”

Nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip while waiting for aid since May 27, the majority by the Israeli army, the United Nations said on Friday.

The Israeli army denies any targeting, insisting it only fires “warning shots” when people approach too close to its positions.

International organizations have for months condemned the restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities on aid distribution in Gaza, including refusing to issue border crossing permits, slow customs clearance, limited access points, and imposing dangerous routes.

On Tuesday, in Zikim, the Israeli army “changed loading plans for WFP, mixing cargo unexpectedly. The convoy was forced to leave early, without proper security,” said a senior UN official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the south of Gaza, at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, “there are two possible routes to reach our warehouses (in central Gaza),” said an NGO official, who also preferred to remain anonymous. “One is fairly safe, the other is regularly the scene of fighting and looting, and that’s the one we’re forced to take.”

- ‘Darwinian experiment’ -

Some of the aid is looted by gangs -- who often directly attack warehouses -- and diverted to traders who resell it at exorbitant prices, according to several humanitarian sources and experts.

“It becomes this sort of Darwinian social experiment of the survival of the fittest,” said Muhammad Shehada, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

“People who are the most starved in the world and do not have the energy must run and chase after a truck and wait for hours and hours in the sun and try to muscle people and compete for a bag of flour,” he said.

Jean Guy Vataux, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, added: “We’re in an ultra-capitalist system, where traders and corrupt gangs send kids to risk life and limb at distribution points or during looting. It’s become a new profession.”

This food is then resold to “those who can still afford it” in the markets of Gaza City, where the price of a 25-kilogram bag of flour can exceed $400, he added.

- ‘Never found proof’ -

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of looting aid supplied by the UN, which has been delivering the bulk of aid since the start of the war triggered by the group’s October 2023 attack.

The Israeli authorities have used this accusation to justify the total blockade they imposed on Gaza between March and May, and the subsequent establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organization supported by Israel and the United States which has become the main aid distributor, sidelining UN agencies.

However, for more than two million inhabitants of Gaza the GHF has just four distribution points, which the UN describes as a “death trap.”

“Hamas... has been stealing aid from the Gaza population many times by shooting Palestinians,” said the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

But according to senior Israeli military officials quoted by the New York Times on July 26, Israel “never found proof” that the group had “systematically stolen aid” from the UN.

Weakened by the war with Israel which has seen most of its senior leadership killed, Hamas today is made up of “basically decentralized autonomous cells” said Shehada.

He said while Hamas fighters still hunker down in each Gaza neighborhood in tunnels or destroyed buildings, they are not visible on the ground “because Israel has been systematically going after them.”

Aid workers told AFP that during the ceasefire that preceded the March blockade, the Gaza police -- which includes many Hamas members -- helped secure humanitarian convoys, but that the current power vacuum was fostering insecurity and looting.

“UN agencies and humanitarian organizations have repeatedly called on Israeli authorities to facilitate and protect aid convoys and storage sites in our warehouses across the Gaza Strip,” said Bushra Khalidi, policy lead at Oxfam.

“These calls have largely been ignored,” she added.

- ‘All kinds of criminal activities’ -

The Israeli army is also accused of having equipped Palestinian criminal networks in its fight against Hamas and of allowing them to plunder aid.

“The real theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the watch of Israeli forces, and they were allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point into Gaza,” Jonathan Whittall, Palestinian territories chief of the UN humanitarian office (OCHA), told reporters in May.

According to Israeli and Palestinian media reports, an armed group called the Popular Forces, made up of members of a Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab, is operating in the southern region under Israeli control.

The ECFR describes Abu Shabab as leading a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks.”

The Israeli authorities themselves acknowledged in June that they had armed Palestinian gangs opposed to Hamas, without directly naming the one led by Abu Shabab.

Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, said many of the gang’s members were implicated in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that.”

“None of this can happen in Gaza without the approval, at least tacit, of the Israeli army,” said a humanitarian worker in Gaza, asking not to be named.