British Labour leader Keir Starmer said on Sunday a lasting ceasefire is needed between Israel and Hamas, his first such statement since the start of the war in October.
The comments appeared to be a change of position for Starmer, who had previously resisted pressure within his Labour party to call for a ceasefire, backing Israel’s right to fight Hamas after the atrocities of October 7.
With Labour well ahead in the polls before an election later this year, Starmer is keen to present a united front to voters, but the conflict in Gaza has tested that unity.
Nearly a third of his lawmakers defied him last year to back calls for an immediate ceasefire. At the same time, the party withdrew support from candidates over their comments against Israel earlier this month.
This week, the Scottish National Party is expected to bring a motion to parliament to call for an immediate ceasefire — something Starmer’s foreign policy chief David Lammy said the party would examine and then come to a decision on.
Addressing the Scottish Labour conference Sunday, Starmer said: “I have just returned from the Munich Security Conference, where every conversation I had came back to the situation in Israel and Gaza and the question of what we can do practically to deliver what we all want to see — a return of all the hostages taken on 7 October, an end to the killing of innocent Palestinians, a huge scaling-up of humanitarian relief and an end to the fighting,”
“What we all want to see… [is] an end to the fighting not just now, not just for a pause, but permanently. A ceasefire that lasts… that is what must happen now.”
He stated that any ceasefire could not be one-sided, and urged a return to a “genuine peace process” aiming for a two-state solution.
Starmer did not clarify whether he believed Israel should halt its offensive even before Hamas agrees to return the 134 hostages it still holds in the Strip.
The Labour chief also voiced opposition to a planned Israeli offensive in Rafah, where over half of the Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians have sought refuge, declaring: “This cannot become a new theater of war. That offensive cannot happen.”
Israel has vowed to enter Rafah, the last of Hamas’s strongholds in the Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that ending the war without dismantling the terror infrastructure would be akin to losing the campaign.
Netanyahu has also said plans are being drawn up to evacuate civilian residents of Rafah to safe zones before a ground offensive begins there.
The speech came during the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip that began when the Palestinian terror group carried out a devastating October 7 cross-border attack that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The thousands of terrorists who invaded also abducted 253 people of all ages to the Palestinian enclave.