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The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway have imposed sanctions and other measures on Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for “their repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian civilians”.
The move marks the first western sanctions against Israeli government ministers, as frustration grows over its renewed offensive in Gaza and its continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of the five countries said Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights”.
“Extremist rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements is appalling and dangerous. These actions are not acceptable,” they said.
The UK sanctions include a freeze on any assets in the country and a ban on travel to Britain. The measures were imposed in a “personal capacity” in relation to the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, where there has been a surge in violence by ultranationalist settlers against Palestinians since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
The settler violence has been accompanied by a dramatic escalation of Israeli operations against militants in the West Bank, sending the Palestinian death toll in the territory to its highest level in two decades.
Netanyahu’s government has also announced a massive expansion of settlements, which are illegal under international law.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, powerful members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, are ultranationalist settlers who have long demanded the annexation of the West Bank. Both responded defiantly to the sanctions.
Ben-Gvir said: “We overcame [the] pharaoh and we will overcome Keir Starmer.”
Smotrich added: “Britain has already tried once to prevent us from settling the cradle of our homeland, and we will not allow it to do it again.”
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said he would hold a “special government meeting” early next week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to decide on our response to this unacceptable decision”.
People briefed on the UK’s preparation of the sanctions said they marked a “big shift” in Labour ministers’ approach to Netanyahu’s government, which renewed its devastating military operations in Gaza in March after a breaking a fragile two-month truce.
Israel has also severely restricted aid deliveries to Gaza, imposing a total blockade for more than two months, before introducing a controversial new system that has sidelined the UN and put aid distribution in the hands of a previously unknown private company.
The UN last month warned the restrictions had left Gaza’s entire 2.1mn population at risk of famine.
Israel is a long-standing ally of the UK but the prolonged war in Gaza, which according to Palestinian officials has killed more than 54,500 people in the enclave, has started to strain relations as it drags on.
During Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the war, militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took 250 hostage.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy last month froze talks on a new free trade agreement with Israel over what he described as the “abominable” situation its offensive has caused in Gaza.
Labour announced it was suspending all direct arms sales to Israel in September, though the UK has continued supplying components manufactured in the UK for the F-35 fighter jet to a shared global pool.
In their statement, the five foreign ministers said that while the measures announced on Tuesday focused on the West Bank, “of course this cannot be seen in isolation from the catastrophe in Gaza”.
They added; “We continue to be appalled by the immense suffering of civilians, including the denial of essential aid.”
Labour MP Emily Thornberry, chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, on Tuesday called on the government to go further and recognise a Palestinian state.
“This opportunity cannot be missed,” she said. “These welcome but long-overdue sanctions are no substitute for it.”
US officials have pushed back against such a move. On Tuesday, Mike Huckabee, the country’s ambassador to Israel, went further still, saying he did not think an independent Palestinian state remained a goal of American foreign policy.
“Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” he told Bloomberg in an interview, suggesting that if a Palestinian state were to be established it could be elsewhere in the region, rather than in the West Bank.
The US state department did not immediately respond to queries about whether the comments by Huckabee, a devout evangelical Christian and longtime supporter of Israel, represented a shift in US policy, or were his personal opinion.