The Conservative peer Nicholas Soames has joined calls for the UK to stop arming Israel after an airstrike killed seven aid workers in Gaza. Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, said the UK should send a “message” about Israel’s actions in Gaza. Hundreds of senior lawyers and judges, including three former supreme court justices, have said in a letter that the government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel. Asked whether the UK should stop doing so, Soames said: “It’s probably time that that happened now, yes, I think if we’re determined to show that we are not prepared to countenance these ongoing disasters.” He added: “Israel have every right to go after Hamas, there’s no shadow of doubt about that.” The UK’s contribution to Israel’s arsenal “would be tiny and it’s probably parts more than anything else”, Soames said, but stopping the exports would send a message. “I say this with real sadness because, I mean, first of all, what happened was an absolute tragedy, and secondly, it was absolutely inexcusable,” Soames said of the strike that killed the aid workers, including three Britons, on Monday. “This is not a fog of war issue with these [aid workers]. They were quite clearly – the whole thing had been deconflicted, organised, everything, and something has gone very, very wrong, and the Israelis need to really get a grip of all this. “And secondly, these people were doing the most wonderful work to provide aid to starving Palestinians … I think it is the message that matters.”
Soames joins his fellow Conservative peer Hugo Swire and three Tory MPs – David Jones, Paul Bristow and Flick Drummond – in calling for arms sales to be suspended. A fourth Tory MP, Mark Logan, called on Thursday for the UK’s arms exports to Israel to be reviewed. “We need to seriously reassess any weapon materials/arms exports to Israel in light of what has happened,” he said in a post on X. David Cameron, the foreign secretary, refused to answer any questions about Israel and Gaza when he was interviewed by the BBC’s Ukrainecast on Thursday morning. Cameron is in Brussels for a meeting of Nato foreign ministers. The Liberal Democrats have written to the prime minister’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magnus, urging an investigation into whether continued UK arms sales to Israel could be a breach of the ministerial code. In the letter, Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ foreign affairs spokesperson, said “the UK must not be complicit in breaches of international humanitarian law”. Cameron said on 8 March that he was due to receive new legal advice about Israel’s compliance with international law “in the coming days”. Since then the government has refused to comment on the advice.
Labour has called for ministers to publish the advice and to stop arming Israel if it states UK arms are at risk of being involved in a breach of humanitarian law. “It’s bad enough having a foreign secretary who avoids questions from MPs in the Commons,” David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said on X on Thursday. “Now he’s not answering journalists on one of the biggest issues of our time. David Cameron must come clean and publish the legal advice on arms exports to Israel.” A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We keep advice on Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law under review and ministers act in accordance with that advice. The content of government advice is confidential.” The chairty World Central Kitchen (WCK) has called for an independent investigation into the Israeli strikes that killed seven members of its team. They died after a drone fired at their convoy of three armoured cars, all of which were clearly marked with the WCK logo on their roofs and sides. Britons John Chapman, 57, James “Jim” Henderson, 33, and James Kirby, 47, were among the seven who died in the attack. The others killed were an Australian national, Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43; a Polish national, Damian Sobol, 35; a Palestinian, Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, 25; and a Canadian-American, Jacob Flickinger, 33. Guardian Newsroom: Crisis in the Middle East On Tuesday 30 April, 7-8.15pm GMT, join Devika Bhat, Peter Beaumont, Emma Graham-Harrison and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad as they discuss the fast-developing crisis in the Middle East. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live