UK Sanctions On Israel Will Come Back To Haunt It

The UK’s quite unnecessary ruling pair of stumblebums, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, have in their wisdom decided to punish Israel for daring to renew its offensive in Gaza, that it has undertaken in order to batter Hamas so badly that it finally agrees to release the hostages and to leave the Strip. Not everyone in the UK is pleased with this display of anti-Israel animus by the two who now preside over British foreign policy. Some commentators, including the admirable Jake Wallis Simons, are furious. More on Simons’ response can be found here: “Labour’s attack on Israel is completely unjustified,” by Jake Wallis Simons, Telegraph, May 20, 2025:

“The world is judging,” David Lammy said in the Commons today [May 20], with all the pique of an imperial overlord rebuking a former colony. “History will judge them. Blocking aid. Expanding the war. Dismissing the concerns of your friends and partners. This is indefensible and it must stop.”…

Israel is no longer “blocking aid.” 100 trucks laden with aid just entered the Strip Tuesday, and there will be more tomorrow, and still more the day after that. But when the blockade was in force, for all of 11 weeks (the blockade began on March 2, at a time when Gaza held a three-month supply of food and medicine), it had a perfect right to do so, as Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention makes clear. To wit:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly allows a state to withhold humanitarian aid from an enemy combatant under certain conditions.

The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments [humanitarian aid] indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:

(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination;

(b) that the control may not be effective, or

(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.

Hamas does “divert aid from its [intended] destination.” Much of that aid is “diverted” from the people of Gaza to Hamas. Until now “control” of the distribution has been nearly nonexistent; Hamas steals what it wants. Hamas does have a “definite advantage to accrue to it” when its fighters know they can take vast quantities of the aid for themselves and their families, which helps Hamas sustain its men, and even gain new recruits. And Hamas sells much of the aid it steals to the Gazans who were supposed to have received the aid for free.

In other words, all three of the permissible reasons for withholding humanitarian aid, as set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 23, have been met. Would someone make sure David Lammy and Keir Starmer are both sent a link to Article 23? They might even read it.

Israel is not taking lightly its decision to now “expand the war.” It does not relish calling back tens of thousands of reservists to active duty; among other effects, including the damage to the economy, the war is taking its toll on the families of soldiers; the divorce rate for reservists has gone way up. But the IDF has finally decided to make this the decisive final stage of the war, more intense than anything that has been launched before. It has become apparent that the negotiations with Hamas have led nowhere; the terror group has no intention of disarming or of leaving Gaza, as Israel demanded. So it is to be more war, and this time, the IDF is pulling out all the stops.

The UK wants to make the IDF end the new offensive that has barely begun, and then to stop fighting altogether. Such a result would leave Hamas still standing in Gaza, and able to present itself to the world, and especially to its fellow Arabs, as the real winner of the Gaza war, because it had proved itself battered but nonetheless able to survive, despite everything the IDF could throw at it over twenty months.

British troops were supplied with the Spike NLOS missile – to start with, directly from IDF stocks for the sake of speed – saving many British lives. In British service Spike was known as “Exactor”, and it was used to defend bases in Iraq and Afghanistan against enemies firing rockets at them or planting bombs nearby. It prevented attacks and saved British lives.

The Spike NLOS missile that saved “so many British lives,” was developed and designed by the Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

And just now the IDF has announced that Yahya Sinwar’s successor as the head of Hamas in Gaza, his brother Mohamed Sinwar, was killed a week ago in an Israeli airstrike. No one has stepped forward to take his place. Can you blame them?

Israel in Gaza is giving the Western world an object lesson in how to fight those who act on the jihadist imperative. Soon enough, Keir Starmer and David Lammy in the UK, and Mark Carney in Canada, and Emmanuel Macron in France, or their successors, are going to discover that the same jihadist enemy that Israel has managed to defeat on so many fronts, despite the attempts by the Jewish state’s supposed allies not just to abandon Israel but to hamstring the IDF, has settled deep inside their countries, and is gnawing at the foundations.