TEL AVIV, Israel – Britain’s new foreign secretary called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories on Sunday, his second foreign trip since Labour’s landslide election victory earlier this month.
David Lammy described the ongoing war in Gaza as “unbearable” and stressed in meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that Britain wanted to help in diplomatic efforts to “achieve a ceasefire agreement and create space for a credible and irreversible path towards a two-state solution”.
Lammy met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. On Monday he will meet Israeli President Isaac Herzog. During his visit, Lammy will also meet families of hostages currently held in Gaza who have ties to the UK. He called for the release of all hostages and a drastic increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Lammy called on Israel to stop settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and said the Palestinian Authority must be “reformed and strengthened”.
Both Lammy’s Labour Party and the previous Conservative government initially avoided calling for an immediate ceasefire, using phrases such as “humanitarian pause”. But now the words are stronger. Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Netanyahu last week there was a “clear and urgent need for a ceasefire”.
Labour’s stance on the Gaza war cost it votes in British elections this month. Although the party won a landslide victory, pro-Palestinian independents defeated Labour candidates in several constituencies with large Muslim populations.
Lammy’s comments came a day after Israel said it carried out a massive attack on Hamas’ secret military commander in the densely populated southern Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing at least 90 people, including children, according to local health officials.
Senior Hamas officials said on Sunday that talks on a possible ceasefire had not been suspended because of the attack. Hamas also denied that Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, the target of the attack, had been killed and said Israel’s “false claims are merely a cover-up of the extent of the horrific massacre.”
Deif and Yahya Sinwar, the highest-ranking Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, are considered in Israel to be primarily responsible for the October 7 attack in which around 1,200 people were killed and 250 kidnapped in southern Israel, triggering the war between Israel and Hamas.
Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombings in Gaza have killed more than 38,400 people and injured more than 88,000, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. The ministry makes no distinction between fighters and civilians in its count.
Information for this article was contributed by Jill Lawless of The Associated Press.
