“Something very bad” is happening to the global Left, a leading Israeli politician has warned, as she condemned progressive allies for defending Hamas.

Merav Michaeli, the leader of the Israeli Labour party, said she was concerned that fellow Left-wingers in Western countries, including “strong allies”, are not distancing themselves from the Islamist terror group.

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Ms Michaeli said in an interview with the Politico Europe website. “It became very, very clear in this attack [on Oct 7] that people who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women [and] the LGBTQ+ community,” she added.

She went on to say that “the more you go to the Left, the more there’s a big mix-up … I fail to see how shouting jihad and calling for a mass murder of Jews is pro-Palestinian.”

“It’s important for me to emphasise to them that when you do not very strongly go against Hamas, and what it does in Gaza including to its own people, you are complicit,” she added.

Hamas is proscribed as a terror group by the UK, EU and US but some Left-wing parties or senior Left-wingers from those regions – such as the “France Unbowed [La France Insoumise]” party – refuse to adopt that terminology.

Her intervention came after Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, was widely criticised for refusing to describe Hamas as a terror group during an interview with Talk TV’s Piers Morgan.

It was not immediately clear if Ms Michaeli, whose interview with Politico was published early on Tuesday, was referring to that interview, which aired on Monday night.

Israel’s Labour movement and other Left-wing parties are an increasingly marginal voice in Israeli politics, which has lurched ever closer to the extreme Right in recent elections. After the November 2022 election, Benjamin Netanyahu formed the most Right-wing coalition government Israel has ever seen, including a national security minister with convictions for anti-Arab racism.

The Israeli Left has also experienced some friction with other Left-wing movements in the West, which are like-minded on economic and foreign affairs but less so on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.