British Foreign Secretary Visits Israel and Calls for an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza
TEL AVIV: The up-and-coming British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, will visit Israel and the Palestinian territories on Sunday. He has emphasized an immediate stop to the fighting in the Gaza Strip. This is his second trip outside Britain since the Labour Party secured a resounding win in the recent polls held earlier this month.
Lammy held the Gaza war as ‘intolerable’ and underlined in his sessions with Israeli as well as Palestinian authorities that Britain is interested in participating in decisions to be made to achieve a ceasefire leading to a two-state solution.
Traveling to the region, Lammy met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He is also set to see more of Israeli President Issac Herzog this Monday and hopes to make the best of these meetings. Further, he intends to visit the families of the hostages detained in Gaza with links to the UK. He has demanded a general RELEASE OF ALL HOSTAGES and a DRAMATIC INCREASE IN HUMANITARIAN RELIEF in GAZA.
Lammy called on Israel to stop building new settlements in the Israeli-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem. He also said that the Palestinian Authority should be “reformed and strengthened. ”
At first, neither the Labour Party nor the previous conservative government was aggressive in calling for an end to not only the bombing but also the use of the word ‘ceasefire,’ instead replacing it with ‘humanitarian break.’ Recently, Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the UK, told Netanyahu of the necessity of the ceasefire, stressing that such a situation is unambiguous and imperative.
Gaza war shaped the votes in the recent UK election, particularly from the labor view on the war. Even in the rout of the Conservative party in the recent election, anti-Zionist ‘Independents’ ensured the defeat of Labour party candidates in several constituencies with concentrated Muslim populations.
Lammy has called for a halt of violence a day after Israel announced that it had attacked Hamas’ armed chief in a massive air strike in the southern Gaza Strip, which killed at least 90 people, including children, health officials said.
On Sunday, the official of Hamas claimed that due to the attack, the ceasefire had not been suspended,d although Cast Lead propagated the opposite opinion. On this matter, Hamas refuted the Israeli assertions that its military head, Mohammed Deif, was dead, referring to the latter as an attempt by Israel to mask the numerous losses.
Deif, along with Hamas’ top official in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is suspected to have masterminded the attack on October 7 that caused about 1,200 deaths, 250 people kidnapped, and led to the current Israel-Hamas war.
Ground operations and airstrikes by Israel have claimed over 38,400 lives and left more than 88,000 people injured in Gaza, the Health Ministry of the occupied territory says. The ministry provides the above facts and figures but does not distinguish between the fighters and the non-combatants.
