Middle East war: UK government urges Israel to show restraint
Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said calls for “actions that lead towards a restrained political solution based on a ceasefire” were “unanimous” among Britain’s international allies yesterday.
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Hide AdOn the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ brutal terror attack on Israel which sparked war in Gaza, peace has never looked further away.
Militants killed 1,200 people in the October 7 attack and took another 250 hostage. Around 100 remain captive.
Yesterday, an Israeli air strike on a mosque in the Gaza Strip killed at least 19 people, Palestinian officials claimed, while the IDF’s bombardment of the Lebanese capital of Beirut intensified.
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Hide AdIranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged rocket fire and airstrikes over recent months, and Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel late on Tuesday.
Last week, the Prime Minister expressed his concern that the “region is on the brink” following Iran’s strike.
Sir Keir Starmer said that a “direct Iran-Israel conflict would have devastating consequences for the people of the Middle East and across the world”.
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Hide Ad“All sides must do everything in their power to step back from the brink and avert it,” he added.
Mr Kyle told the BBC: “We are working in lockstep with our international allies.
“We can’t instruct Israel as a sovereign state to do anything, but as key allies we can advise them and the advice is very clear and it is unanimous from our international allies that we must exercise restraint.”
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Hide AdHe added: “We are not giving operational instructions to Israel but it is very clear from the words that I am using and the Prime Minister is using, that actions that lead towards a restrained political solution based on a ceasefire … those outcomes do determine the actions that need to be taken that would lead towards it, and I think that speaks for itself.”
The Science and Technology Secretary also said the UK was “on standby” to remove British nationals from Lebanon, where Israel launched a ground invasion earlier this week.
On evacuations, Mr Kyle pledged: “If the demand is there we will use whatever is needed, whether it’s more chartered flights or whether it’s the military.”
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Hide AdThe UK’s last scheduled charter flight left Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport in Lebanon last night.
From the Opposition, Conservative shadow foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell said “that Israel absolutely has the right of self-defence”.
“No government would allow an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation to sit there lobbing rockets over the border and moving its populations, killing its population – more than 60,000 Israelis have had to move south,” he told the BBC.
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Hide Ad“And the right approach is not a ceasefire, actually. The right approach is for Hezbollah and its Iranian masters to abide by United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, and pull back behind the Litani River, and that would end the conflict that’s taking place in Lebanon.”
He added that the UK recognition of Palestine too early could “look like a reward” for Hamas’s attack on southern Israel one year on.
"It shouldn’t be at the beginning of that process which would look like a reward for the slaughter that was perpetrated just a year ago,” Mr Mitchell explained.
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