Did Ursula von der Leyen say that Israel has the right to defend itself by any means necessary, including cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip? No, that's not true: The president of the European Commission never made such a statement.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on October 14, 2023. The same message was shared here and here. The full caption reads (translated from Russian to English by Lead Stories staff):
In 2022:
Russian attacks on civilian facilities and cutting off water, electricity, and heat as winter sets in are war crimes.
In 2023:
Israel has the right to defend itself in any way it wants, including cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip.
That's the double standard!!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Nov 7 13:14:10 2023 UTC)
The video's text overlay refers to a video from October 19, 2022, when von der Leyen addressed the European Parliament plenary session in preparation for the October 20-21, 2022, European Council meeting. She said regarding Russian attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure: "Targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure with the clear aim to cut off men, women, children [from] water, electricity, and heating with the winter coming, these are acts of pure terror and we have to call it as such."
Lead Stories performed a search for the phrase "Israel has the right to defend itself by any means, including cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip" (archived here) and found no evidence that such a message existed or that von der Leyen said anything similar, as a search of thousands of pages indexed by Google News showed.
A search of the European Commission website for the same phrase found no results:
(Source: European Commission screenshot taken on Tue Nov 21 19:48:22 2023 UTC)
On October 14, 2023, one week after the Hamas attack on Israel, the European Commission issued a press release quoting von der Leyen: "The Commission supports Israel's right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists, in full respect of international humanitarian law." In her statement, she did not support cutting off electricity and water to Gaza. On the contrary, she announced that the EU would triple its humanitarian aid to Gaza to ensure that civilians in Gaza "can be provided with the basic necessities required."
