Britain’s New Government Comes Under Pressure to Pivot on Gaza

When Britain’s Labour Party took power following the country’s July 4 election, it pledged to undo what was brought on by 14 years of Conservative rule. While much of that work has focused on domestic issues, it has also extended to foreign policy matters—most notably, Britain’s position on Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

The incoming Labour government wasted little time. Just two weeks after the election, the country’s new foreign secretary David Lammy announced that the U.K. would restore its funding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees. (Several countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., suspended funding to the agency following Israeli allegations that some of its employees had participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. After multiple investigations into the matter, many have subsequently resumed funding.) One week later, the government announced that it would be dropping the previous governments’ plans to challenge the right of the International Criminal Court to seek an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners and human rights advocates alike welcomed these moves as a much-needed policy shift to bring the country more in line with its commitments under international law. But the more substantive change they’re looking for is the one that the British government has yet to fully commit to: the suspension of arms sales to Israel. 

So fraught has Britain’s position on this been that a Foreign Office diplomat recently resigned in protest of the inaction, warning that the country may be complicit in war crimes. “Each day we witness clear and unquestionable examples of War Crimes and breaches of International Humanitarian Law in Gaza perpetrated by the State of Israel,” Mark Smith, a counterterrorism official at the British Embassy in Dublin, told colleagues in a note announcing his resignation, the details of which were first reported by journalist Hind Hassan. “There is no justification for the U.K.’s continued arms sales to Israel yet somehow it continues. I have raised this at every level in the organization … As a fully cleared officer raising serious concerns of illegality in this Department, to be disregarded in this way is deeply troubling. It is my duty as a public servant to raise this.”

Although this isn’t the first time that British civil servants have raised concerns about their potential culpability for war crimes in Gaza, it appears to be the first known public resignation to have taken place as a direct result of it—a trend in the U.S., where at least a dozen U.S. officials have quit their posts in the last several months in protest of Washington’s policies on the war. The move is reflective of wider public sentiment in the U.K., where some 58% of Britons support ending arms sales to Israel for the duration of the war in Gaza, according to a July poll conducted by YouGov, compared to just 18% who are opposed. An even greater proportion (78%) support an immediate ceasefire.

Calls for the U.K. to halt weapons sales to Israel reached a fever pitch earlier this year after revelations that the British government had received advice from its own lawyers stating that Israel was in breach of international humanitarian law in Gaza—a disclosure that would legally compel the British government to halt further arms exports. At the time, Lammy, then the Labour opposition’s shadow foreign secretary, urged the Conservatives to make the legal advice public, which they declined to do. Since entering government as foreign secretary, Lammy hasn’t publicized the legal advice himself, opting instead to commission a “comprehensive review” to assess whether Israeli war crimes might have been committed in Gaza. That process is still ongoing.

“The levels of discontent are widespread,” says Joseph Willits, the head of parliamentary affairs at the Council for Arab-British Understanding, noting that he believes there are others in both the foreign and defense ministries who are considering following in Smith’s footsteps. “They want to see the legal advice.”

The outcome of the review has already been delayed by several weeks, in large part relating to concerns over how the British government distinguishes between weapons used by Israel to mount offensive attacks on Gaza and those that are used defensively. For example, it’s estimated that Britain provides components for roughly 15% of Israel’s F-35 fighter planes, which the Israeli military has been known to use both offensively and defensively.

Yasmine Ahmed, the U.K. Director of Human Rights Watch, tells TIME that although the British government might be reluctant to limit these kinds of arms, which could feasibly be used for defensive purposes, the law is clear. “There are no caveats or defenses or exemptions for the requirement to suspend when there is a clear risk that U.K. military equipment might be used to facilitate or carry out serious [human rights] violations,” she says. “If that threshold is met, then they have to be stopped, irrespective of whether that same equipment could be used for defensive purposes.”

Such a move wouldn’t be without precedent. As recently as 2014, the British government threatened to suspend 12 licensed arms exports to Israel over concerns that their components could be used by the Israeli military for potential human rights violations in Gaza. The British government briefly restricted arms sales to Israel in 1982, following the country’s invasion of neighboring Lebanon. It took similar action in 2009. Ahmed notes that the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza today—where more than 40,000 people have been killed, according to figures by the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry, which are considered reliable by the U.S. government and the U.N.—dwarfs that of the circumstances that led to arms embargoes in previous decades.

“At the very least, this government should be following in the footsteps of the Cameron government,” Ahmed says, noting that “the serious violations that have happened in the context of these hostilities greatly outnumber what happened in 2014.”

Read More: Israel Has Been Accused of War Crimes in Gaza. Could Its Allies Be Next?

Starmer’s government isn’t the only one facing these pressures. Across the Atlantic, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has faced growing calls for the U.S. to impose an arms embargo on Israel—a move that her chief policy adviser has so far ruled out.

Although the U.S. provides considerably more arms to Israel than the U.K., Ahmed notes that the British government choosing to halt its arms exports would be a powerful way of registering its disapproval of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and could apply more pressure on Israel’s other allies, including major arms suppliers such as the U.S. and Germany, to do the same.

“It’s easier to make clear your commitments to international law on positions that aren’t significantly contentious and where you’re going to get very significant pushback,” Ahmed says. “But really, your commitment to international law is proven in situations, and particularly in situations like this, where there will be pressure but also where the consequences of not doing so are so dramatically significant.”