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People carrying an inflatable of a bomb with the words “End arms trade with Israel” passing by the Spanish Parliament in Madrid, Spain on 5 October 2024 [Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images]
The Spanish parliament decided Tuesday to accelerate the passage of an arms embargo bill against Israel, according to media reports, Anadolu Agency said.
The Sumar, Podemos, Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), Basque EH Bildu and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) parties submitted a petition to the Congressional Bureau demanding the urgent procession of the bill, said the El Mundo newspaper.
The request, also supported by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party, was approved, halving the timeline and accelerating the process.
It came after parliament passed a non-binding motion on May 20 that urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel in response to its military operations in the Gaza Strip.
The motion, introduced by the leftist Sumar alliance, part of the ruling coalition, along with opposition parties Podemos and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), was approved in a 176-171 vote.
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UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.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/O74hZCKKdpA
A Palestinian boy is seen at the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on May 26, 2025. (Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images)
“They call places safe, then attack them,” said one Palestinian aid worker. “I’d rather stay home with my family and face whatever comes, at least we all die together, rather than be separated.”
A United Nations group said Tuesday that Israel’s renewed ground offensive and continued airstrikes in the Gaza Strip displaced roughly 180,000 Palestinians in just 10 days this month, leaving desperate, starving families with nowhere to turn as Israeli forces target shelters and other civilian infrastructure.
The estimate from the International Organization for Migration’s Global Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster came a day after the Israeli military bombed a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City, killing dozens.
CCCM said Tuesday that direct attacks on shelters for displaced people “have become common” in recent weeks as Israeli forces have moved ahead with Operation Gideon’s Chariots, an expansion of Israel’s devastating assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave. The official death toll from Israel’s assault, which began in the wake of a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, surpassed 54,000 on Tuesday.
“Since the collapse of the cease-fire on 18 March, nearly 616,000 people have been displaced—multiple times, some as many as 10,” said the U.N. group. “During the cease-fire, over half a million people went back to their homes, mostly in the north, to try to rebuild their lives. That fragile progress has now been reversed, as intensified military operations are once again displacing families away from the areas they had only recently returned to.”
Citing humanitarian partners on the ground, CCCM noted that roughly 80% of the Gaza Strip is either under a displacement order or marked as a “no-go” zone, making most of the enclave’s population vulnerable to Israel’s ground and aerial onslaught.
“My sibling died in a ‘safe’ zone after they bombed it,” one Palestinian aid worker told CCCM. “They call places safe, then attack them. I’d rather stay home with my family and face whatever comes, at least we all die together, rather than be separated.”
CCCM also raised alarm over a newly launched aid scheme led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organization with ties to the U.S. and Israeli governments.
“These arrangements risk circumventing established humanitarian coordination mechanisms, undermining humanitarian principles, and putting civilians at further risk by promoting displacement without essential protection or adequate access to lifesaving services,” the U.N. organization said.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor echoed that warning, saying in a statement that “all available information about the new Israeli mechanism clearly indicates that it is designed as a tool of coercive control over the Gaza Strip’s civilian population.”
“It limits families to just one aid parcel per week under highly restrictive security conditions, thus violating the principles of non-discrimination, adequacy, and continuity in humanitarian aid,” the group said. “Such limited distribution is not a genuine humanitarian response, but a deliberate policy aimed at barely managing hunger, rather than actually alleviating it.”
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.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/O74hZCKKdpAVote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Keir Starmer and David Lammy’s remarkable attempts to publicly realign their government’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza reflect similar shifts recently performed by political leaders in France, Canada, the US and Germany.
On 20 May, Starmer told MPs that innocent children’s suffering in Gaza was “intolerable”, while Lammy called it “abominable”. Lammy condemned Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich’s call to “purify Gaza” by ethnic cleansing as “dangerous, repellent and monstrous”[1].
By 26 May even the GermanChancellor, Friedrich Merz admitted that Israel’s actions in Gaza “can no longer be justified”.
Given such politicians’ unstinting support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, we may be forgiven for questioning whether their latest pronouncements indicate a shift in policy, a rhetorical attempt to placate public opposition to state collusion in genocide, or an insurance policy against being named in future legal proceedings.
In fact, Lammy’s suspension of UK-Israel free trade talks on 20 May in response to Israel’s block on aid to Gaza was swiftly followed on 26 May by an official visit to the port of Haifa by UK Trade Envoy, Lord Ian Austin, who as the UK Embassy to Israel triumphantly tweeted was “witnessing cooperation at every stop”[2].
While President Trump’s recent decision not to visit Israel was a signal to US allies to adjust their foreign policy stance, UK arms exports to Israel have been a consistent focus of sustained, pro-Palestine mass protests in Britain since October 2023.
Alongside an unparalleled mass movement on the streets of British towns and cities a quiet but effective legal challenge was launched against the UK government’s policy of arms exports to Israel. Campaigners took the UK government to court, accusing it of failing to uphold domestic and international legal obligations by supplying weapons and components used in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Starmer and Lammy’s performed their volte-face in the House of Commons just four days after a landmark High Court challenge by Global Legal Action Network (GLAN)[3] and Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq[4] against the UK government’s decision on 2 September 2024 to continue licensing export of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, while suspending other arms exports due to risk of violations of international law.
The High Court case displays a web of contradictions and the hypocrisy of ministers’ public statements on arms sales to Israel. According to GLAN and Al-Haq, it exposed “structural flaws in accountability” in the UK arms export control regime, which “renders it unfit to ensure respect for fundamental legal and humanitarian obligations”.
Al-Haq points out, “In Parliament, the government maintains it is for the courts to decide whether Britain is complying with its legal obligations. Yet in court, their lawyers argued the opposite — they say that such matters are not for the judiciary to examine.”
Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, representing GLAN points out, “The government has been telling Parliament that it is unable to answer questions regarding its decision to indirectly arm Israel because that decision is being tested in the courts, and at the same time telling the judiciary that it cannot examine that decision because that is the role of Parliament.”
In the High Court, UK government lawyers rejected Al-Haq’s assertion that there is at least a serious risk that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and said there is “a tenable view that no genocide has occurred or is occurring”.
Internationally accepted arguments relating to breaches of the Genocide Convention, in the context of the enormous harms suffered by civilians in Gaza, were dismissed by UK government lawyers as “touchy feely”.
The UK government also claimed it had seen “no deliberate targeting of women and children”, and therefore “no serious risk of genocide”. In its own evidence, the government included a report entitled “Research Report: Long-Range Shootings or Shootings of Minors.” This was withheld from GLAN and Al-Haq, despite a duty to disclose and an explicit request for its disclosure.
The UK government also claimed in the High Court that Israel’s targeting policies were as good as the UK’s. Is that even a defence?
That this happened days before Lammy’s statement to MPs on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories will lead many to suspect that Lammy’s latest windy denunciations of Israeli politicians and a few settlers is a red herring intended to shield UK government ministers from charges of arms exports to Israel in breach of domestic and international law.
Lammy in his statement to MPs on 20 May referred to “a new, extensive ground operation throughout Gaza”, “renewed bombardment, new displacement and new suffering”, and said “we are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict”.
The emphasis on the new level of Israeli atrocities in Gaza is intended create a bogus political and legal distinction between the ‘normal conduct’ of Israel’s war on Gaza, impossible to conduct without arms exports, military intelligence and diplomatic support from Britain, and the latest ‘unacceptable conduct’ of the siege of Gaza by Israel, the starvation and mass displacement of Palestinians, which David Lammy and Keir Starmer condemn so robustly before TV cameras in the House of Commons.
Given the sustained horror of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians over a period of 20 months and the growing evidence of UK government complicity in immoral and illegal arms sales, it will be a difficult political trick for Starmer and Lammy to pull off.
As Gearóid Ó Cuinn, Director of the Global Legal Action Network says, “The government has now been exposed as being disingenuous in Parliament and in court; this merry-go-round of delay and inaction is facilitating genocide and needs to stop. A decision in our case will come far too late for the people of Gaza who are being starved to death – the government must immediately end arms sales and other forms of military support to Israel and apply sanctions.”
[4] UK’s ‘flawed’ assessment of genocide in Gaza revealed in court that contradicts claims made in Parliament, 20 May 2025 https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/26458.html
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dust
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Palestinian residents flee the conflict zones by car, on donkey carts, and on foot, carrying their belongings to safer areas following intense Israeli military attacks on the Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza on May 21, 2025. [Saeed M. M. T. Jaras – Anadolu Agency
The Israeli army controls over 77% of the Gaza Strip, local authorities said on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
“Field data and verified analysis indicate that the Israeli occupation forces now effectively control approximately 77% of Gaza’s total geographic area,” Gaza’s government media office said in a statement.
The Israeli army gained control through “direct ground offensives, the deployment of its forces in residential and civilian areas, or preventing Palestinians from accessing their areas, lands, and properties via intensified fire, or forced evacuation,” it added.
The office strongly condemned the Israeli plans of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, systematic genocide, and settler colonialism by force, “under the cover of a siege and an open war targeting both people and infrastructure.”
It held Israel and its supporters, including the US, UK, Germany, and France, fully responsible for the crime of genocide in Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel Hayom newspaper said that the army plans to control 70-75% of Gaza within nearly three months as part of an expanded military campaign in the enclave.
Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive against Gaza since October 2023, killing more than 53,900 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war crimes against defenseless civilians in the enclave.
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UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘‘not a genocide’‘ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dust
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Jake Wood, seen in 2021, the CEO of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. [Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images]
Jake Wood, the CEO of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has announced his resignation, saying current conditions make it impossible to deliver aid to Gaza without violating basic humanitarian principles—something he refuses to do.
In his resignation statement, Wood said that the current circumstances make it impossible to deliver humanitarian aid without compromising “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”
Wood also called on Israel to “significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms” while also urging “all stakeholders to continue to explore innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination.”
He stressed that the only path to a lasting solution lies in the release of all hostages held by Hamas, a ceasefire, and a clear roadmap toward peace, security, and dignity for everyone in the region.
Not much is known about the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which is supported by Washington and Tel Aviv and whose headquarters have been registered since February in Geneva, but the United States supported this foundation without revealing whether it contributes to it directly.
Jake Wood, the founder and outgoing CEO, is a former US Marine sniper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has expressed support for Israel on social media platforms in the past.
Israel continues its policy of systematic starvation against around 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza by closing border crossings to aid convoys, which have been stuck at the borders since 2 March. This has pushed the territory into a state of famine and has led to the deaths of many.
In recent days, the Israeli military has intensified its operations in both the northern and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, announcing a new ground offensive.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.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/O74hZCKKdpAUK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘‘not a genocide’‘ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dust
