Donald Trump said overnight that group of US trading partners, including the bloc, would get a letter ‘today or tomorrow’
in Brussels
Elsewhere, the EU’s diplomatic service has drawn up a list of options to sanction Israel, after finding “indications” that the Middle Eastern country had breached its human rights obligations over its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
A document for EU foreign ministers to discuss next week outlines ten options, such as suspending the EU-Israel association agreement or visa-free-travel for Israelis, freezing preferential trade terms, or terminating Israel’s participation in Europe’s research and student exchange programmes.
The five-page text seen by the Guardian, first reported by Reuters, makes no recommendations.
It remains unclear if any of the proposals will gain traction. So far only one member state, Spain, has pushed for the suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement, which requires unanimity. Even governments that are Palestine’s strongest supporters in the EU are reluctant to back any move to reduce people-to-people contacts.
The paper emerged after EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced a potentially-significant deal with Israel to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza.
In a statement on Thursday Kallas said Israel had agreed to “the substantial increase of daily trucks for food and non-food items to enter Gaza”, as well as the reopening of the Jordanian and Syrian aid routes, distribution of food from bakers and public kitchens and resumption of water supply to the water desalination facility.
A spokesperson for Kallas said the agreement was the outcome of a dialogue Kallas launched with Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar. Her pledge to raise the humanitarian crisis with Israel was made after the completion of the review of the EU-Israel agreement.
One open question is whether Kallas and EU member states now feel enough has been done to pressure Israel to change course, or whether more is needed. The EU response will certainly reflect how Israel implements the aid deal.
“We count on Israel to implement every measure agreed,” Kallas said.
The EU and financial markets are on nervous standby to see if Donald Trump will carry through with his latest threat to hike import duties to 15% or 20%.
If he does it would signal a breach of good faith in negotiations which intensified in the past 10 days and almost certainly lead to calls for counter tariffs.
Trade ministers meet in Brussels on Monday and are expected to agree to extend its current 90 day pause on retaliation if a deal is announced today or over the weekend.
It has threatened 25% tariff on more than €20bn worth of US imports but paused them to create space for negotiations.
On Thursday night Trump ramped up his assault on Canada declaring he would impose a 35% tariff on imports next month and planned to impose blanket tariffs of 15% or 20% on most other trading partners adding the EU and Canada could receive tariff letters by Friday.
“Not everybody has to get a letter. You know that. We’re just setting our tariffs,” Trump told NBC News.
“We’re just going to say all of the remaining countries are going to pay, whether it’s 20% or 15%. We’ll work that out now.”
The declaration will have exasperated EU leaders who were already resigned to taking a 10% tariff as the price of doing trade with Trump, an import duty rate five times the average rate that applied before he was inaugurated in January.
EU diplomats said an agreement in principle is effectively on Trump’s desk waiting to be approved since Wednesday, his original self-imposed deadline for a deal.
The EU could learn about Donald Trump’s proposal on tariffs today, after he said overnight a group of US trading partners, including the bloc, would get a letter “today or tomorrow”.
He said:
“I’m talking European Union, which is, as you know, many countries, and Canada. We’ll be putting them out over the next couple of hours.”
He later issued a letter to Canada, ramping up the proposed tariffs to 35%, up from the current 25%, and threatening to increase it further if Ottawa seeks to retaliate.
Not a great sign.
You can imagine lots of EU diplomats will be nervously refreshing Truth Social today.
It’s Friday, 11 July 2025, it’s Jakub Krupa here, and this is Europe Live.
Good morning.