The European Union recently published new guidelines intended to ensure that Israeli products from the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights do not receive a tariff exemption.

These directives, issued by the European Commission's trade department, are intended to enforce a 2004 agreement that would ensure that goods produced in areas occupied by Israel in 1967 would not receive customs duty relief.

In 1995, Israel signed a customs exemption agreement with the European Union, which came into force five years later. However, in a technical agreement signed in 2004, settlement products were excluded from the preferential trade terms. 

However, implementation has remained haphazard, and only a small amount of the imported products were inspected.

According to the new guidelines, when submitting a request for exemption from customs duties, importers will be required to enter a special code in the trade union's digital system to ensure that they were not produced in the settlements. If they fail to do so, they would be forced to pay the tax.

Some countries have already started publishing and updating these guidelines on their websites, including Spain and Belgium.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said that its employees checked the details with their counterparts in the European Union, who clarified that this is only a technical change and not a change in policy regarding the export of products from Israel.

The EU delegation to Israel told Haaretz that this step is merely "technical," and does not reflect a change of policy toward settlement goods. 

According to Haaretz, this is the European Union's first technical change to products coming from Israeli settlements since the decision to label these products in November 2015.