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Palestinian protesters take part in a demonstration against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in front of the UN headquarters, in Gaza City. [Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan was preparing international arrest warrants for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir before he went on administrative leave from his position, due to an ongoing investigation concerning him, TheWall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
According to the report, the arrest warrants relate to the two Israeli far-right ministers’ involvement in the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Citing current and former ICC officials, the paper also noted that the decision has reportedly been passed on to Khan’s deputies, although it remains unclear how they will proceed.
The ICC is reportedly investigating additional unnamed Israeli officials, along with Ben Gvir and Smotrich, over their involvement in settlement expansion.
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
An Israeli airstrike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Monday is believe to have killed 36 people. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
[Guardian] Exclusive: Letter to PM signed by retired supreme court justices among others says lack of action will imperil international legal system
The UK must impose sanctions on the Israeli government and its ministers and also consider suspending it from the UN to meet its “fundamental international legal obligations”, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, including former supreme court justices, have said.
In a letter to the prime minister, they welcome Keir Starmer’s joint statement last week with the leaders of France and Canada warning that they were prepared to take “concrete actions” against Israel. But they urge him to act without delay as “urgent and decisive action is required to avert the destruction of the Palestinian people of Gaza”.
The signatories, including the former supreme court justices Lord Sumption and Lord Wilson, court of appeal judges and more than 70 KCs, say that war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law are being committed in Palestine.
There is mounting evidence of genocide, which is either being perpetrated or at a minimum at serious risk of occurring, the letter states, highlighting recent comments by the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who said Israel’s army would “wipe out” what remains of Palestinian Gaza.
The signatories tell Starmer: “All states, including the UK, are legally obliged to take all reasonable steps within their power to prevent and punish genocide; to ensure respect for international humanitarian law; and to bring to an end violations of [the right to self-determination]. The UK’s actions to date have failed to meet those standards … The international community’s failure to uphold international law in relation to the occupied Palestinian territory contributes to a deteriorating international climate of lawlessness and impunity and imperils the international legal system itself. Your government must act now, before it is too late.”
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
Palestinians forcibly displaced by israel’s assault on Gaza walk amid the rubble of the Jabalia refugee camp on January 19, 2025. (Photo: Omar Al-Qataa/AFP via Getty Images)
“There is nothing ‘voluntary’ about the program,” said one critic. “The population of Gaza is to be forced out of their ancestral homeland through deliberate mass starvation and mass killings.”
Israel’s Security Cabinet on Sunday approved the creation of new Defense Ministry directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip under the guise of “voluntary emigration.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz euphemistically called the new agency the “Voluntary Emigration Bureau for Gaza residents interested in relocating to third countries” and claimed it will operate in accordance with international law.
However, given Israel’s incessant flouting of international law—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice is hearing a genocide case against the country—critics excoriated Katz’s claim.
“In reality, there is nothing ‘voluntary’ about the program the Netanyahu government is implementing,” wroteWorld Socialist Web Site editor Andre Damon. “The population of Gaza is to be forced out of their ancestral homeland through deliberate mass starvation and mass killings by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”
The Israeli cabinet has approved the establishment of an “administration for the voluntary transition of Gaza’s residents to third countries” – aka for mass ethnic cleansing
Katz also said the new directorate would be run “in accordance with the vision of U.S President Donald Trump,” who last month said that the United States would “take over” Gaza after emptying the strip of its approximately 2.1 million Palestinians and transform the coastal enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
After doubling down on his proposal, Trump then attempted to gaslight the world by directly contradicting his previous remarks when he said earlier this month that “nobody is expelling any Palestinians” from Gaza. By then, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had declared that the so-called Trump Plan was “taking shape” in coordination with the U.S. administration.
However, leaders of Egypt and Jordan, where Trump has proposed sending Gazans, vehemently oppose the plan. A counterproposal issued by Egypt and other Arab nations—which involves rebuilding Gaza without forcibly displacing its residents—has the support of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation and nations including China, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.
The reconquest of Gaza is a longtime goal of Israel’s far-right, which, since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and subsequent obliteration of the strip, has moved to put its recolonization plans into action.
Israeli Col: Hamas is not the issue Gaza's people are'The population of Gaza are barbaric riffraff….the only solution is Trump's vision,' national security expert and colonel in the Israeli army's reserve force Gabi Siboni called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza during a panel programme.
“October 7 changed history. As a result of the brutal massacre, the Gazan Arabs have lost their rights to be here forever, they’ll not stay here,” Daniella Weiss, co-founder of the extremist settler movement Nachala, said during an October 2024 conference on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza attended by Smotrich and numerous other Israeli lawmakers.
“Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza,” Weiss added.
The modern state of Israel was founded largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians, sometimes accomplished via massacres and death marches. The majority of Gaza’s population today are survivors and descendants of Palestinians forced from their homeland to make way for Jewish immigrants in the post-World War II era.
Palestinians call the mass forced displacement of 1948 the Nakba, or catastrophe, and far-right Israelis today threaten to carry out a new Nakba to “finish the job,” as Smotrich and others have said.
Critics including Israeli troops have claimed that the IDF is carrying out the so-called “General’s Plan,” a blueprint for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has enforced what former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who is also wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity—called a “complete siege” of Gaza, a blockade which has exacerbated deadly starvation and illness in the strip.
The ‘General’s Plan’ is being fully implemented in all of Gaza, not just the north. Israel is liquidating the ghetto with the full backing of Canada and the United States. This is what ethnic cleansing looks like under bombardment & starvation. pic.twitter.com/l0XxmU1RQB
On Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll from Israel’s 535-day assault on Gaza surpassed 50,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children. This, as Israeli forces have renewed their ferocious bombardment and invasion of the strip, killing hundreds of Palestinians including nearly 200 children, and wiping out entire families.
The ministry said that more than 113,000 others have been wounded since October 2023, and at least 14,000 more Palestinians are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.
However, experts—including the authors of two peer-reviewed articles in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—say the actual death toll is likely much higher.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) holds a meeting with the Security Cabinet after Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in West Jerusalem on October 01, 2024. [Avi Ohayon (GPO) / Handout – Anadolu Agency]
Israel said it had delayed holding a cabinet meeting on Thursday to ratify a ceasefire with Hamas, blaming the group for the hold-up, as Palestinian authorities said Israeli air strikes overnight had killed 77 people in Gaza, Reuters reports.
Hamas senior official, Izzat el-Reshiq, said the group remained committed to the ceasefire deal, agreed a day earlier, that was scheduled to take effect from Sunday to bring an end to 15-months of bloodshed.
President Joe Biden’s envoy, Brett McGurk, and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff were in Doha with Egyptian and Qatari mediators working to resolve the last remaining dispute, a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
The dispute involves the identities of several prisoners Hamas is demanding be released and it is expected to be resolved soon, the US official said.
Israeli government spokesperson, David Mencer, told reporters Israeli negotiators were in Doha to reach a solution.
The complex ceasefire accord emerged on Wednesday after mediation by Qatar, Egypt and the US to stop the war that has devastated the coastal territory and inflamed the Middle East.
The deal outlines a six-week initial ceasefire with the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands have been killed. Hostages taken by Hamas, which controls the enclave, would be freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners detained in Israel.
The deal also paves the way for a surge in humanitarian aid for Gaza, where the majority of the population has been displaced and is facing acute food shortages, food security experts warned late last year.
Rows of aid trucks were lined up in the Egyptian border town of El-Arish waiting to cross into Gaza, once the border is reopened.
Israel’s acceptance of the deal will not be official until it is approved by the country’s security cabinet and government, and a vote had been slated for Thursday.
However, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has delayed the meeting, accusing Hamas of making last-minute demands and going back on agreements.
“The Israeli cabinet will not convene until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office said.
Hardliners in Netanyahu’s government were still hoping to stop the deal, though a majority of ministers were expected to back it.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party said in a statement that its condition for remaining in the government would be a return to fighting at the end of the first phase of the deal, in order to destroy Hamas and bring all the hostages back. Far-right police minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has also threatened to quit the government if the ceasefire is approved.
In Jerusalem, some Israelis marched through the streets carrying mock coffins in protest at the ceasefire, blocking roads and scuffling with police.
Despite the hold-up to the cabinet meeting, political commentators on Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, said the latest delay would likely be resolved and that the ceasefire was a done deal.
Calls for faster implementation
For some Palestinians, the deal could not come soon enough.
“We lose homes every hour. We demand for this joy not to go away, the joy that was drawn on our faces – don’t waste it by delaying the implementation of the truce until Sunday,” Gazan man, Mahmoud Abu Wardeh, said.
The accord requires 600 truckloads of humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza every day of the ceasefire, with 50 carrying fuel. The first phase of the agreement will also see Israel releasing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
While people celebrated the pact in Gaza and Israel, Israel’s military conducted more attacks, the civil emergency service and residents said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 81 people had been killed over the past 24 hours and about 188 injured. The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said at least 77 of those were killed since the ceasefire announcement.
The Israeli military is looking into the reports, a military spokesperson said.
Israel secured major gains over Iran and its proxies, mainly Hezbollah, as the Gaza conflict spread. In Gaza, however, Hamas may have been crippled, but without an alternative administration in place, it has been left standing.
If successful, the ceasefire will halt fighting that has razed much of heavily urbanised Gaza, killed over 46,000 people, and displaced most of the tiny enclave’s pre-war population of 2.3 million, according to Gaza authorities.
That, in turn, could defuse tensions across the wider Middle East.
With 98 foreign and Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, phase one of the deal entails the release of 33 of them, including all women, children and men over 50.
Global reaction to the ceasefire was enthusiastic.
Israel launched its campaign in Gaza after Hamas-led gunmen burst into Israeli border-area communities on 7 October, 2023, killing 1,200 soldiers and civilians and abducting over 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.
