EU rebuffs call to put Hezbollah on terror list

Despite last week’s terrorist attack in Bulgaria that Israel blamed squarely on Hezbollah, the EU Tuesday rejected Israeli calls to place the Lebanese organization on its terrorist blacklist.

Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou- Marcoullis, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said at a press conference in Brussels with Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman that there is "no consensus among the EU member states for putting Hezbollah on the terrorist list of the organization.”

Such a move, she said, required unanimity from the EU’s 27 member states.

Liberman, who met Tuesday with his EU colleagues as part of the annual EU-Israel Association Council meeting, had called on the body to put Hezbollah on its terrorist list. Doing so would make illegal any financial transfer from the EU to Hezbollah or to any member of that organization. Liberman said such a move would send a powerful message both to the international community and the Israeli public.

"From our point of view it is unacceptable that Hezbollah terrorists meet and talk with Western diplomats in Beirut on one hand, and they pursue their terrorist activity on European soil on the other hand,” he said at the press conference.

Kozakou-Marcoullis, speaking for the EU, plainly refused the request. (...)