JERUSALEM, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- Israel suffered Wednesday a series of diplomatic setbacks in Europe, including a court order to remove Hamas from the list of terror groups and a European Parliament vote for the recognition of a Palestinian state.
A European Union Court in Luxembourg issued a ruling Wednesday, calling for a temporary suspension of the Palestinian Hamas militant group from the bloc's terrorist organizations list.
The court charged that the decision to add Hamas to the list was influenced by media reports and a similar U.S. move.
It called upon the European Union (EU) Commission to submit evidence to the court on Hamas' terrorist activities within three months.
Israel lists Hamas as a terrorist organization vowing to its destruction. Israel and Hamas fought a 50-day war in the past summer.
Also on Wednesday, despite strong opposition from Israel, Switzerland hosted a conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention in Geneva to discuss the state of the Palestinian human rights in the occupied territories in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Switzerland is the keeper of the convention, which governs the rules of war and military occupation.
The conference adopted a declaration which emphasized a prohibition on colonizing occupied land and insisted that international humanitarian law be obeyed in areas affected by the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
It also called for "all serious violations" to be investigated and those responsible for breaches to be brought to justice.
Aside from the ongoing Israeli construction in the settlements and the ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, it specifically referred to the 2014 Gaza War in which more than 2000 Palestinians and 72 Israelis died.
The meeting, boycotted by Israel, the United States, Canada and Australia, drew delegates from 126 countries.
Wednesday also witnessed a first-ever vote in the European Parliament based in the French city of Strasbourg. The EU legislature passed a motion supporting "in principle recognition of Palestinian statehood," as part of a two-state solution with Israel.
The resolution supports two states on the basis of 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as the capital of both.
Similar resolutions have already approved by parliaments in a number of European countries in recent weeks, such as Britain, Ireland, Sweden and France.
Israel greeted these European moves with a barrage of criticism, calling it "anti-Israel."
Despite the fact that the European Union considered the procedure to be a "technical," and the sanctions against Hamas will stay intact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday slammed the decision and blamed European countries for being "hypocrites."
"It is understood by all that Hamas -- a murderous terrorist organization, the covenant of which specifies the destruction of Israel as its goal -- is an inseparable part of this (terror) list," he said in a statement released by his office.
In harsher comments made later in the day, Netanyahu accused European countries of not learning the lesson of the holocaust, in which the German Nazi regime killed six million Jews in the 1930-1940s.
"Today we witnessed staggering examples of European hypocrisy," Netanyahu said prior to a meeting with U.S. Republican Senator-elect Joni Ernst.
"The same Hamas that has committed countless war crimes and countless terror acts," he added.
"It seems too many in Europe, on whose soil six millions Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing," he said. "But in Israel, we've learned. We'll continue to defend our state against the forces of terror and tyranny and hypocrisy."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry also condemned the Geneva Summit, calling it in an official statement a "political exercise lacking any basis in the Geneva Conventions."
The Palestinians launched massive diplomatic efforts in the international arena to end the Israeli occupation and establish a Palestinian state following the collapse of the U.S. mediated negotiations in April.
The European Union has been increasingly frustrated due to Israel's ongoing expansion of settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which make it harder to form a continuing territory in a future Palestinian state. Editor: Mu Xuequan