The change in policy is a direct result of sustained pressure from activists and organisers across the Palestine movement. But what comes next?
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We can certainly retain our anger at the government’s complicity. No sanction can offset the foreign policy decisions made by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and former foreign secretary David Lammy, the repression of domestic pro-Palestine advocacy, or the sheer loss of life. But we must balance this with cautious optimism that the political tide is turning.
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The necessary next step is a full arms embargo and an end to cooperation with Israeli security forces – to truly have teeth, these sanctions must not take with one hand and then give with another. Miliband has said that “we’ve already suspended over 30 arms licences used by the IDF in Gaza. That suspension remains fully in place”, and that the government will “now also refuse all licence applications for arms and other exports that materially contribute to the occupation”. But components of F-35 jets continue to be exported to Israel and used for operations in Gaza, as are surveillance technologies such as drones and radar made in the UK by Elbit Systems. This is a total dereliction of duty by the British government.
Miliband’s announcements were a necessary reminder that a just political future is possible and, within it, a reckoning with past crimes. As a campaigner, I have borne witness to Israel’s most egregious human rights violations: I have documented Israeli settlers committing pogroms against the community of Al-Mufaqara, sat in Palestinian villages threatened with home demolitions and army raids, and witnessed the ongoing daily misery of Israel’s apartheid policies. This has all strengthened my motivation to see the end of the Israeli occupation.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
10 September 2026 – Please find below a letter from Dr Natalie Roberts, Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders to the Prime Minister Andy Burnham and the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.
Dear Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary,
Congratulations on your appointments as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. I am writing to you as the Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the United Kingdom to request an urgent meeting regarding the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Since 1 November 2023, we have repeatedly written to your predecessors to provide evidence of atrocities directly witnessed and experienced by our 1,500 colleagues working in Gaza, to remind the UK of its power and its obligation to act, and to request an urgent high-level meeting. We have never received clear acknowledgement of the evidence that we have provided, nor have we ever been offered that meeting. In July last year we concluded that the UK Government just did not want to acknowledge what everybody else can see: that genocide is being committed in Gaza, and it is being committed with the military, diplomatic, and material support of the UK.
We therefore greatly welcome your decision to sanction illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to recognise that what is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing, and to align with the 2024 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. Thank you for finally taking some first tangible steps towards action, rather than claiming that the UK could only powerlessly stand by while a foreign government committed war crimes with complete impunity. But while the new UK sanctions are a welcome, and necessary, response to the illegal occupation and spiralling violence in the West Bank, it is difficult for us to understand how they will have any tangible impact on the catastrophic situation in Gaza.
On that subject, we urge you to hear directly from MSF. MSF is the UK’s largest medical humanitarian organisation still operating in Gaza. Since January 2026, we have been prevented by the Israeli authorities from bringing international staff and supplies into Palestine, yet we continue to work at scale across Gaza and the West Bank. Around 1,500 Palestinian MSF staff are providing surgical support, wound care, physiotherapy, maternity and paediatric care, general healthcare, vaccination, and mental health services as well as water production and distribution, under extraordinarily difficult conditions. My Palestinian colleagues see every day, in our hospitals and clinics, the human consequences of political decisions taken far from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Despite the October 2025 ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza continue to face daily violence, repeated displacement, severe restrictions on humanitarian access, and appalling living conditions. The situation is characterised by the systematic erosion of Palestinians’ possibility to survive with dignity.
MSF teams witness catastrophic medical needs: traumatic injuries, malnutrition in infants and pregnant women, and rampant infectious disease. The Israeli military is now estimated to occupy at least 60 percent of the Strip, as Gaza has been divided by an unclearly marked and constantly shifting Israeli-military-controlled “yellow line”. MSF teams continue to treat patients suffering from blast injuries, fragment wounds, and blunt trauma caused by explosions and gunshot wounds, including people who are shot by Israeli forces when approaching the shifting boundary. Israeli forces continue to issue sudden displacement orders, forcing Palestinians to flee with almost no warning. Palestinians in Gaza are also dying from preventable diseases and untreated health conditions, as communicable diseases spread amid severe Israeli restrictions on essential supplies and a lack of access to basic services. Israeli authorities are leaving Palestinians to suffer and die through its illegal blockade, and Israel’s deliberate policies of violence, destruction, and denial of basic needs have created a deadly cycle of extreme deprivation, suffering, and death, fuelling its genocidal campaign and violating international humanitarian law. More than two and a half years of global inaction and complicity in the face of genocide have allowed this catastrophe to persist.
Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained hundreds of Palestinian healthcare workers from Gaza since October 2023, holding many without charge and routinely denying access to those imprisoned. They include our colleague, MSF orthopaedic surgeon Dr Mohammed Obeid, who was arrested during an Israeli military raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in October 2024. Dr Obeid is still detained by Israel without charge, and we are very concerned for his safety and wellbeing.
Fifteen Palestinian colleagues have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, and many more injured. Yet the Israeli military has denied any criminal investigation into the killing or injury of MSF staff. Last month, the Israeli Military Advocate General decided to close without investigation the cases MSF submitted for review: the multiple attacks on an MSF convoy in Gaza City in November 2023 that killed two, and the February 2024 strike on an MSF shelter in Khan Younis that killed two and injured six. With this decision, the Israeli authorities made it clear that there is no prospect of accountability within the Israeli legal system for the killing of our staff, just as there has been no accountability for Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. Although we support the efforts of the International Courts in pursuing accountability for war crimes, our colleagues, their families, and the Palestinians living in Gaza cannot wait for the outcome of lengthy processes – processes which the Israeli government has anyway stated it considers invalid.
Over a year ago we asked that the UK Government:
Acknowledges and respects the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and acts decisively to end the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Israeli government in Gaza
Ends all military cooperation with Israel and suspends all arms transfers to its government
Ends all material and diplomatic support to the Israeli government
Speaks out to acknowledge and condemn the genocide in Gaza
Pushes to end the siege and allow unfettered access of humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, into Gaza
Creates a pathway for the evacuation of medical patients from Gaza to the UK to be treated
While the recent shift in UK policy makes progress in responding to those asks, and we once again thank you for showing moral leadership, we would like to meet to discuss further steps the UK Government should take to uphold fully its obligations to act under International Humanitarian Law to protect all civilians in Gaza.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Natalie Roberts
Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) UK
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On the International Day of the Disappeared, families of people who went missing during the war are demanding that the fate of their loved ones be revealed, in front of the Red Cross in Gaza, on 30 August 2026 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday its team met Israeli authorities and toured a military detention facility as part of efforts to resume access to detainees held in Israel, Anadolu reports.
The ICRC said in a statement that the team held a technical meeting with detaining authorities, conducted an assessment and toured parts of the facility, but “neither met nor had direct contact with any detainees.”
“This meeting is a step in the right direction towards resuming proper visits to detainees held in Israeli places of detention,” said Julien Lerisson, ICRC’s head of delegation for Israel and the occupied territories.
Lerisson said the organization would continue discussing the arrangements for such visits with relevant authorities to enable their resumption.
The ICRC has been unable to access detainees held in Israeli detention facilities since October 2023.
It reiterated the need to be informed of the fate and whereabouts of all detainees and to be granted access to them.
Under international humanitarian law, detainees must be treated humanely, provided with acceptable conditions of detention and allowed to communicate with their families, the ICRC said.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of policy of global privateering.
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Press vests lie on a table outside Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip. [Abdallah F.s. Alattar – Anadolu Agency]
An Israeli military court on Tuesday sentenced Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Fatafta to four years in prison on charges of so-called “incitement”, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate said.
The syndicate condemned the sentence in a statement, calling it “a new chapter in the targeting of Palestinian journalists and a systematic attempt to silence voices and suppress freedom of opinion and expression”.
The Israeli army arrested Fatafta on 30 May 2024 while he was passing through the Container checkpoint northeast of Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank.
The syndicate said prosecuting journalists in Israeli military courts over their journalistic work or expression of their views was “a flagrant violation of international law and international humanitarian law”. It said the military justice system was being used to punish and intimidate journalists and prevent them from carrying out their professional duties.
It added that the sentence against Fatafta came as part of an ongoing Israeli policy of pursuing, arresting and prosecuting Palestinian journalists in an attempt to “hide the Palestinian narrative and silence voices reporting the truth about what is happening on the ground”.
The syndicate said “incitement” charges had become a broad pretext used by Israeli authorities to pursue journalists, activists and people expressing their views, in violation of the right to freedom of expression and journalistic work.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of policy of global privateering.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A view of military vehicles patrolling the Syrian-Israeli border in the Majdal Shams area of the Golan Heights, as the Israeli army reinforces its ground forces amid ongoing military mobilization in the region on December 15, 2024. [Saeed Qaq – Anadolu Agency]
UN investigators said on Tuesday that Israeli operations in Syria, including the detention of dozens of people, may amount to “war crimes”.
“We are deeply alarmed by violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by Israel on Syrian territory, which may amount to war crimes,” Commissioner Fionnuala Ni Aolain told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on Syria, mainly targeting military sites. Israel has said the strikes are aimed at preventing the new authorities from taking control of the former regime’s weapons stockpiles.
Israeli forces have also moved beyond the buffer zone bordering the Golan Heights, most of which Israel has occupied since 1967, reaching Mount Hermon on the border between Lebanon and Syria. Israel has said it intends to establish a demilitarised zone in southern Syria, while Israeli officials have repeatedly said its forces have no plans to withdraw.
Ní Aoláin said Israeli military activity in southern Syria was escalating and becoming “increasingly sustained and entrenched”, involving ground incursions, patrols and repeated raids and searches that were harming civilians and displacing residents.
She said Israel’s establishment of temporary checkpoints and permanent military infrastructure on Syrian territory had had a “significant impact” on civilians.
The commission said it had documented the detention of 49 people, including two children, by Israeli forces in June 2026. It said the detainees were believed to have been transferred across the border, stressing that such actions “may amount to war crimes”.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of policy of global privateering.
