Deir el-Balah, Gaza and London, UK – Israa Saleh, a small, soft-spoken Palestinian doctor who wears a colorful hijab, has been in mourning for months.
Her colleague Maisara al-Rayyes was killed in November when an Israeli airstrike destroyed her family home in Gaza City. Her remains are still under the rubble.
Saleh described al-Rayyes, who like her received a prestigious Chevening scholarship from the British government, as a “brother.”
“I still mourn the loss,” she told Al Jazeera in Deir el-Balah, the central Gaza city she fled to after being displaced ten times in the past nine months. “This war has robbed us of everything.”
She returned to Gaza in 2022 after completing a master's degree in Liverpool, a city that reminded her of the Strip with its “coastal nature” and “amazing” people.
Rishi Sunak was then the new Conservative prime minister. Back home, Saleh was working with Médecins du Monde, the international humanitarian organisation, and was planning to get married.
But a year later, Israel's latest and deadliest attack on Gaza crushed her wedding dreams as spending time with her fiancé became impossible and venues were bombed.
Saleh, 30, has lived in northwest England for more than a year and has closely followed the recent U.K. election that ushered in the first Labour government in 14 years. He is now cautiously waiting for Britain to change its stance on the war.
“I wasn't really surprised when [Labour leader] “Keir Starmer won,” he said. “But nothing gives me more hope than the protests breaking out across the country. This may put pressure on the Labour Party to act.”
She believes that the UK is “politically complicit in genocide” on the one hand, given its support for the Israeli army, while “helping the population” on the other, having delivered some humanitarian assistance to the Strip.
“Their position must be clear. They must take a firm stand and listen to their people to stop this war. That is how the Labour Party should operate.”
Asaad al-Kurd, a 51-year-old English teacher and father of six in Deir el-Balah, is less hopeful.
She usually follows the headlines in the international media, but after losing her sister and her children in the war, as well as many other relatives, her life seems too “hellish” to cover the news.
“I felt alienated by this year’s election,” he said. “Both Labour and the Conservatives are complicit in genocide. Keir [Starmer] and Rishi [Sunak] “They have promised unparalleled military support to Israel and justified Israel’s monstrous war crimes… Whatever they say, it gives me no hope. Nothing will change at all.”
He compared the UK to the “tail” of Washington, as their foreign policies are closely aligned.
“[But] “We have to remember that the United Kingdom is behind our catastrophe,” he said. “The Conservative Party Prime Minister Arthur Balfour gave Israel land in Palestine.”
The war in Gaza, a priority in foreign policy
Al-Kurd is a professor at UNRWA, the agency that several countries, including the UK, stopped funding after Israel claimed that 12 of its 30,000 employees took part in the Hamas-led raid on southern Israel on October 7, during which 1,139 people were killed. Israel has provided no evidence to support these allegations.
As the death toll in Gaza approaches 40,000, Olivia O'Sullivan, director of the UK in the World programme at the Chatham House think tank, said the war was “a priority in terms of foreign policy” for the new Labour government.
She told Al Jazeera that changes on “big policy issues”, as opposed to differences in rhetoric, would signal a move away from the previous conservative administration.
Resuming funding to UNRWA, a shift in arms exports to Israel or explicitly backing the jurisdiction of international courts would signal that Labour was on a different path, he said.
In opposition, Starmer frequently expressed solidarity with Israel and angered many when he said the party had the right to cut off water and electricity supplies to Gaza. He soon retracted that statement, but his stance overall cost Labour four seats to pro-Palestinian independent candidates and widened the gap with British Muslims who have traditionally supported the party.
In November, Starmer voted against a parliamentary motion calling for an immediate ceasefire. Before the election, during a radio interview, he said he would not “declare that something is genocide or not”, and reaffirmed Israel’s “right to self-defence”.
But he also said all countries, including Israel, “must be held accountable before the court of international law” and promised to review legal advice on arms sales to Israel as prime minister.
David Lammy, the new foreign secretary who is expected to visit Israel soon, broke ranks with the official UK line in late May when he backed the independence of the International Criminal Court after it sought arrest warrants for Israeli officials and Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes.
Conservatives said the ICC had no jurisdiction in the case, while US President Joe Biden said it was “outrageous” to suggest any equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Richard Hermer, Starmer's nominee as attorney general, is also “one of the interesting appointments” in the new government, O'Sullivan said.
Hermer, who has been critical of Israel, specializes in human rights. He condemned the previous government’s move to criminalize boycott campaigns and was among a small group of Jewish lawyers who wrote an open letter reminding Israel of its “international obligations” at the start of the war.
“On some of these international law issues, we may see some changes,” said O'Sullivan, who described Hermer as a “great source of expertise.”
According to Kamal Hawwash, a British-Palestinian academic who stood as an independent candidate on a pro-Palestinian list in the election, if Starmer’s government does not challenge the Conservatives’ position on the ICC, this would mean it is against “the application of international humanitarian law equally to all states.” The Labour Party ultimately won the seat Hawwash contested.
Joseph Willits, head of parliamentary affairs at the Council for British Arab Understanding (CAABU), said the new government needed to “fully support” the ICC “unequivocally,” adding that there was “some optimism” surrounding Hermer's appointment.
The Palestinian State and internal divisions
The Labour Party manifesto promised to ultimately recognise Palestinian statehood as part of a “renewed peace process” towards a two-state solution.
But since the Conservatives suggested in January that Britain could recognise a Palestinian state before the end of a peace process, the Labour pledge is not seen by analysts as revolutionary.
Spain, Norway and Ireland recognised the State of Palestine this year, angering Israel.
“The new Labour government is highly unlikely to do this,” said Glen Rangwala, an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. “Their manifesto commitment… makes recognition conditional on the resumption of a negotiation process… in practice, this allows the question of Palestinian statehood to be stalled.”
Rangwala expects the Labour Party to treat the handful of pro-Palestine independents in Parliament as “fringe figures”.
The party probably assumes that after the “current phase” of the Gaza war ends, the public profiles of independents will “decline even further” and pro-Palestinian voters will return to the Labour fold, he said.
But Willits said Starmer risks his reputation if he fails to address the growing divide.
“Some may think it is easy, with a large Labour majority in parliament, to now dismiss Palestine as an irrelevant, marginal, fifth-column issue,” she said. “If Keir Starmer does not want to be persecuted and remembered only as the one who said Israel had the right to cut off electricity and water in Gaza, then he needs to manage this policy reset on Palestine. This will be a major test for this government.”
Preparing for a possible political earthquake
Looking ahead, Starmer's approach could be affected by the outcome of the US election in November.
But even if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House, analysts said the U.K. is likely to try to influence the U.S. position rather than take the lead.
“If Trump wins the election, US actions on this issue will be much more unpredictable,” O’Sullivan said. “They will still be important and influential, so I think a Starmer government would look to manage the consequences of that.”
Rangwala, of Cambridge University, said that while a change of government in the UK was unlikely to “bring about a significant alteration in British policy towards Palestine and Israel”, the US election was a “key complicating factor”.
“If a new Trump administration backs Israel's expanded war aims, many within the Labour Party would seek to distance themselves from Washington,” he said.
“But even then, the administration’s policy is more likely to be directed at encouraging the US to soften its position rather than adopt an overtly different stance – a difference in tone vis-à-vis the US rather than a difference in substance.”
As the war approaches its 10th month, CAABU’s Willits said: “The number one priority must be to end this genocide, and that includes ending dependence on what Washington does, or doesn’t do.”
