On July 23, a Palestinian court ordered the release of products that customs officers had confiscated as they made their way from the Israeli Burkan settlement toward the West Bank city of Salfit, a Palestinian official informed Al-Monitor.

The judge’s decision left the customs officials in a state of shock and anger, but a court order must be obeyed and they were thus compelled to return goods worth tens of thousands of shekels to their Palestinian owner. One customs officer later sarcastically said to Al-Monitor, “That’s justice for you!”

The Palestinian government launched in June 2010 successive campaigns to combat the importation of goods coming from Israeli settlements built on Palestinian lands occupied in 1967. The campaigns began with a symbolic poster being affixed to the home of President Mahmoud Abbas, and later to homes of thousands of Palestinians, that read “This house does not contain settlement products.” As a result of these efforts, customs officers seized — on a daily basis — goods smuggled from Israeli settlements to the tune of millions of shekels per year.

The European Union’s decision on July 17 to ban cooperation with or funding of Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian lands — including east Jerusalem — and prohibit the financing of any settlement related faction or institution was the culmination of years of Palestinian diplomatic efforts in EU countries, as a former official of the Palestinian Embassy in Brussels, Majed Bamiah, told Al-Monitor in an interview on July 22.