Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on Tuesday that she has suspended her country’s defense cooperation agreement with Israel over the conflicts throughout the Middle East.
Meloni said at an event in the northern city of Verona that her government “has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel in consideration of the current situation.”
Recommended Stories
Her announcement came about a week after the Israeli military fired warning shots at an Italian peacekeeping convoy outside Beirut, Lebanon. No one was injured in the incident, which Meloni called “completely unacceptable,” while Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani summoned the Israeli ambassador to Rome for a third time since 2024.
The 2003 Memorandum of Understanding was ratified by Italy in 2005 and is renewed automatically every five years.
Italy is one of multiple European countries that have expressed varying degrees of uneasiness over the U.S. and Israeli wars against Iran.
In late March, Italian Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto acknowledged that the government denied U.S. aircraft use of its Sigonella base in eastern Sicily for operations against Iran, but said it was not a political decision, but because the flight plan was not communicated ahead of time and the aircraft had not applied for authorization to land, according to Corriere della Sera.
Spain issued a broad ban last month on U.S. aircraft seeking to use its military bases for operations in Iran, a conflict Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has repeatedly criticized as misguided and unjust.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized European countries that have not answered his call for assistance in ensuring ships can safely sail through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway off Iran’s coast that the country has shut down since the conflict began. The closure of the strait has caused energy prices to skyrocket worldwide.
Trump announced on Sunday that the United States would begin its own blockade of ships coming to or leaving from Iranian ports in an attempt to squeeze the Iranians and force them to be more amenable at the negotiating table.
ITALY REFUSED US WAR PLANES ACCESS TO AIRBASE, CLAIMS ‘NO FRICTIONS’ WITH WHITE HOUSE
French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that, together with the United Kingdom, they will organize a conference to set up a multinational defensive mission aimed at ensuring the freedom of navigation in the strait.
“This strictly defensive mission, separate from the warring parties to the conflict, is intended to be deployed as soon as circumstances permit,” he said.
