Keir Starmer has told MPs “I have never described what is going on in Gaza as genocide” after being pressured to do so by the Green Party’s co-leader.
During Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Carla Denyer asked Starmer:”“How much more evidence does need before calling out what is happening as a genocide and acting in line with the UK’s responsibilities as a signatory of the Genocide Convention?”
But following foreign secretary David Lammy’s refusal to use the term in reference to the Middle East conflict on Monday, Starmer made a similar point of not using the term banded around freely by pro-Palestine protesters to describe Israeli action in Gaza.
Denyer also asked the PM is he believed the move by the Israeli Knesset to block the work of the relief agency UNRWA represented “a breach of international law?”In his response
Starmer stressed that “all sides should comply with international law”.
On Monday, the Tory MP Nick Timothy urged Lammy to take the opportunity to clarity to MPs that “there is not a genocide occuring in the Middle East.”
Lammy said he believed it was up to the international courts and legal experts to determine genocides, adding he flet the “use of words like “genocide” in relation to conflict in the Middle East “undermines the seriousness of that term.”
The foreign secretary referred also to the genocides of the Holocaust and in Rwanda.
