UK may suspend arms shipment to Israel
The British government is reportedly considering suspending arms to Israel as soon as July 30th, due to concerns that Israel is breaching international laws in its war on Gaza, The New Arab and agencies reported on July 29th.
This decision follows the Labour Party’s decision to restore funding to UN Palestinian agency UNRWA and to drop its legal bid against the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) seeking an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The UK has approved over $614 million of weapon sales to Israel since 2015, though since the beginning of the country’s war on Gaza, pressure has increased for the government to halt its shipment of weapons altogether.
This suspension represents a significant shift in policy from the previous Conservative government, who nearly revoked sales following the deaths of three British aid workers in Gaza by an Israeli strike. The then foreign secretary David Cameron, however, insisted that Israel had not breached international humanitarian law.
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Professor Philipe Sands, a member of Palestine’s legal team for the ICJ case, said the UK should cease arming Israel to comply with the court’s July 19th that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories “violates international law.” UN member states should not “render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territories,” Sands said.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has committed to recognising a Palestinian state but without a specified timeline.
Earlier in July, David Lammy said that his office was carrying out a “comprehensive review of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law” and had called on the previous government to suspend arms sales to Israel.
On July 18th, he addressed the House of Commons and said that Palestinians had been “in purgatory for decades” and “denied the state that is their inalienable right.”
The New Arab and agencies
