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Labour MPs caution Starmer as Israeli president set to visit UK: Report
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is set to visit the UK next week, causing outcry among Labour MPs, who have urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer not to meet with the visiting delegation, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Herzog is expected in the UK on Wednesday and Thursday, according to the British newspaper. The purpose of his unconfirmed visit is still unclear.
Downing Street sources told The Guardian that no appointments with Herzog would be confirmed until next week. But Labour MPs have already called on Starmer not to meet him.
“The UK’s recognised the ‘real risk’ of genocide perpetuated by Israel, so unless this meeting is about peace, what message are we sending?” Sarah Champion, Labour MP and chair of the international development committee, wrote in a post on X.
Former shadow chancellor and Labour MP John McDonnell said he was “appalled at the decision to allow this representative of a government that is systematically killing Palestinian children on a daily basis to visit our country”.
‘This is not complicity, this is participation’: UK journalist
The second and final day of the Corbyn-led unofficial inquiry into alleged British complicity in Israeli war crimes is beginning in London, a stone’s throw from Downing Street.
The first speaker, Matt Kennard, an author and investigative journalist who tracks the UK’s surveillance flights over Gaza, said he had earlier used the word complicity to describe Britain’s role, but now, “it definitely crosses a line into participation”.
The government says the planes flown from Cyprus are sent to locate captives in Gaza, but questions are being raised over whether the UK is sharing intelligence with Israel.
Kennard said flights are “still going daily”.
“When they say hostage rescue, it’s preposterous,” he said.
He questioned why a plane had, according to his research, flown over the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the centre of fighting.
“I believe that it’s part of [Israel’s] military campaign,” he said. “I think they are collecting information on the ground to help Israel in their genocidal war against the Palestinians.”
UK has ‘utterly breached criminal law’, says lawyer at Corbyn-led inquiry
Forz Khan, a lawyer for the family of James Henderson, a British aid worker who was killed in Gaza in an Israeli attack in April 2024, told the Corbyn-led tribunal that “it is highly likely that the prime minister of this country is guilty of genocide.
“Has Britain fulfilled its legal obligations? The answer is a clear No,” he said. It has “utterly” breached criminal law and legal obligations “as well as assisted genocide”, he added.
Henderson, 33, was among seven workers for the aid group World Central Kitchen killed by the Israeli attack in April.
“It is highly likely that the information which was provided to the Israelis which caused that strike came from a plane flying over Israel flying from RAF Akrotiri,” he claimed, referring to the UK airbase in Cyprus that planes have set off from for surveillance flights over Gaza.
Any suggestion UK Foreign Office not on the right side of the law ‘met with panic’, says British diplomat
Mark Smith, a British diplomat who quit over the UK’s continued arms trade with Israel, has appeared via videolink at the so-called Gaza tribunal.
He was the lead official on an arms export licensing report, but resigned from the Foreign Office in August 2024.
The report he worked on “assesses whether the government is legally compliant in exporting arms to certain countries”, he said. “It’s particularly used when a given country is involved in armed conflict.”
But he described the office’s working culture as “very strange” and “different to anything I’ve ever experienced in the civil service”.
“Everyone wanted to make it look as though we were on the right side of the law, and any kind of suggestion [otherwise] tended to be met with panic and a kind of extreme pressure, to not talk about that.”
