New Delhi: After Britain announced sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank Tuesday, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said Britain’s consulate in East Jerusalem would be shut down, and that Britain would be excluded from a US-led coordination mission for Gaza. “Measures against Israel will not go unanswered,” he said at a press conference.
Britain is the third country after France and Canada to announce sanctions against Israeli settlements amid growing diplomatic tensions between Israel and some of its longstanding allies. In a joint statement, the three countries said the action “marks a further turning point in our approach to protecting the two-state solution”.The British sanctions prohibit goods produced in Israeli settlements, and will target companies and individuals providing services that support the expansion of settlements.
British Foreign secretary Ed Miliband also accused Israel’s government of turning a blind eye to “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians by Israeli settlers and called the measures the “beginning of a new approach” to the Israeli-Gaza conflict, one that “not only calls out injustice and suffering but acts”.He said the British government’s official position was that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was unlawful because of the “entrenchment of its control, its intention to extend permanent sovereignty, and its expansionist agenda via illegal settlements”.That position, he said, was consistent with a 2024 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice and should be reflected in Britain’s “economic relationship” with the occupied West Bank.As a result, Britain, he said, would introduce “a new comprehensive sanctions regime” over the next six to nine months. “The sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel,” Miliband said.Later, even Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the targeted measures were “aimed not at the Israeli people, but in support of the two-state solution”.
