UK accuses Israeli ‘terrorists’ of ethnic cleansing in West Bank with government backing. Ed Miliband announces sanctions on trade with settlements as PM says in the Guardian it is time to act

In his statement to parliament, Miliband said the UK government would enact:

• An import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories and a new ban for arms licences and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.

• A comprehensive sanctions regime against providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements and a ban on advertising them in the UK.

• Personal sanctions against key individuals accused of promoting settler violence.

• A new ban for arms licences and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.
  

  

  Palestinian landowners, journalists and protesters run from teargas fired by Israeli security forces blocking a road leading to a newly built Israeli settlement near Dura in the West Bank in June. Photograph: Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images

 Pippa Crerar, Jessica Elgot and Kiran Stacey

Tue 8 Sep 2026

Settler terrorists supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government are committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Ed Miliband has said, in the UK’s starkest condemnation since the foundation of the Israeli state.

Andy Burnham, the prime minister, said he would “not stand by” as horrific suffering continued, writing in the Guardian that for too long the UK had been hesitant to act, “fearful of being accused of being anti-Israel”.

In the Commons, the foreign secretary said the government would now take the official position that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was unlawful in its entirety, as he announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements.

The dramatic shift in the UK’s position comes after a summer of intense diplomacy against a backdrop of increasing settler violence in the West Bank, which has resulted in 12 nations – including France and Canada – announcing they would impose sanctions.

In a joint statement Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said: “The time has come to take further action to uphold our commitment to protect the two-state solution, our interests and to stand up for our values, before it is too late.”

In response, the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Saar, announced the closure of the UK consulate in Jerusalem and that 12 British MPs and activists – including Jeremy Corbyn and Labour MP Diane Abbott – would be banned from entering Israel.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/08/uk-accuses-israeli-terrorists-ethnic-cleansing-west-bank-government-backing  

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]  

"A state banning “dates from Ma’ale Adumim [a city in the West Bank]” while “continuing to licence the equipment used to enforce the checkpoints around it” had not “changed its relationship with the occupation … It has rearranged its communication strategy.” UN expert Francesca Albanese calls for ‘true paradigm shift’ as Miliband resets policy on Israel Exclusive: UN special rapporteur on occupied territories says ban on goods from settlements ‘important’ but must go further if it is to amount to more than a ‘press release’

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said she would not join people dismissing policy as ‘theatre’ before details announced. Photograph: Jordi Ruiz Cirera/The Guardian

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic Editor

Mon 7 Sep 2026  

The UK’s planned ban on trade with unlawful Israeli settlements is a welcome, if overdue, first step and must be judged according to its practical impact, a UN expert has told the Guardian.

The UK foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has vowed to act more decisively against Israeli settlements, as well as continued restrictions of aid into Gaza, prompting the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, to claim on Saturday that Downing Street was motivated by “Jew hatred”.

Miliband said what he had been told about restriction on aid into Gaza had reinforced the need for more decisive action. But Huckabee, writing on X in support of the Israeli foreign ministry’s own criticisms, said: “The Brits have lost it. The Jew hate of their government knows no boundaries and knows no facts.”

Huckabee did not mention in his statement that Miliband is himself Jewish. The Israeli foreign ministry had said: “Had the foreign secretary been interested in facts rather than stories, he would have known that there are no restrictions whatsoever on bringing medicines into the Gaza Strip, and that no medicine is being blocked.”

Palestinian groups in the UK are holding judgment until they see the fine detail of Miliband’s policy, due to be announced on Tuesday, but are expecting the most significant shift since a previous foreign secretary, David Lammy, withdrew most arms export licences in September 2024.

Speaking to the Guardian, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, said a “ban on settlement goods was a change in UK government stance and absolutely important”. She added she would “not join those dismissing it as theatre before the details had been announced”.

She said a settlement trade ban would have to be part of “a true paradigm shift to Israel-Palestine that ultimately seeks to implement the international court of justice advisory opinion in 2024”, which stated that Israel’s presence in the occupied territories was “unlawful in its entirety”. The opinion, she added, said that “all states carry an obligation – not a preference of an obligation – not to recognise the situation as legal, and not render aid and assistance in maintaining it”.

Albanese also said the trade ban could not be narrowly confined to goods – such as agricultural products and cosmetics – since “they are a fraction of what sustains the occupation, and a fraction that Israel can absorb without difficulty”.

The package should also aim to include trade in services, she said, progressively suspending British intelligence cooperation, all arms licensing and the unexamined flights out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Albanese warned that if the steps were not taken or were “completely off the table”, the changes would “over time come to be seen as not amounting to a reckoning, but a press release”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/un-francesca-albanese-miliband-israel-palestine-settlements-trade?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]   

“The holocaust in Palestine could be stopped if the European Union, Israel's biggest trading partner, would suspend trade agreements and impose crippling sanctions and the United States would impose an arms embargo." — Rula Jebreal, Award-winning Palestinian journalist and author

dawnmena.org

 

“The holocaust in Palestine could be stopped if the European Union, Israel's biggest trading partner, would suspend trade agreements and impose crippling sanctions and the United States would impose an arms embargo." —  @rulajebreal, Award-winning Palestinian journalist and author

"The absolute incapacity of Western leaders to enforce international law when it comes to Israel is EPIC..." Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

 Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

 

The absolute incapacity of Western leaders to enforce intl law when it comes to Israel is EPIC. 

 

Ministers, Prime Ministers, Presidents of Republic: Doing NOTHING, diverting attention, sanctioning individual ministers IS NOT enforcing the intl law that was developed after the Holocaust and WWII to prevent another Holocaust and WWII. 

 

At this critical point, Your states have a CLEAR obligation to: 

 

1. Sanction Israel 

 

2. Impose a total arms embargo (no buy, no sell, no transfer, direct or indirect) 

 

3. Break the siege (send navies instead of dropping food on the head of starving genocide survivors) 

 

4. Suspend all trade agreements with Israel till the end of the genocide, occupation and apartheid. 

 

5. Investigate and prosecute individuals and orgs that have committed crimes in the oPt. Together we can, and we will.

 https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1950070686510092792

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Elder Speech

@elderspeech

·

2h

Francesca Albanese is saying what far too many in power refuse to: this isn’t a diplomatic failure. It’s a moral collapse. International law was meant to prevent atrocities like this, not be selectively enforced. The time for statements has passed. Action is now a legal and moral obligation.

SAVE THE CHILDREN please suspend all arms sales to the Government of Israel

SAVE THE CHILDREN please suspend all arms sales to the Government of Israel

Stephen Kapos is a regular figure on the pro-Palestine marches, often as part of the ever-growing Jewish bloc: “My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.”

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos  STOP THE WAR

 

“My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.” – Stephen Kapos

A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they’re on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.

Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.” They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, “This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!”

“As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up,” Kapos said in video published by Double Down News. “We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail.”

Kapos’ comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January found “plausibly” genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.

According to Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.

Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.

On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an “antisemitic mob.”

Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”

He said he is also protesting “the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.”

Kapos predicted that “today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that.”

“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” Kapos asserted. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what’s happening.”

Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Long before today’s growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said in 2010 that “the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid” and that “the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism.”

Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued during his lifetime that “what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation” was “almost identical” to “what was done to the German Jews before the ‘Final Solution,’” and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.

Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as “antisemites” and “self-hating Jews” who, in Meyer’s case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.

Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, “I’ll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on.”

Source: Common Dreams

26 Apr 2024 • by Brett Wilkins

 Stop the War

Free Gaza: Stop the Massacre - End the Siege! 

🇵🇸 #MayDay4Palestine 🇵🇸