Israel blocks two Labour MPs from entry and deports them

David Lammy said it was “unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning that two British MPs on a parliamentary delegation to Israel have been detained and refused entry by the Israeli authorities.

“I have made clear to my counterparts in the Israeli government that this is no way to treat British Parliamentarians”, the foreign secretary said in a statement on Saturday.

This morning, an Israeli spokesperson defended the decision to bar the Labour MPs and their assistants from entering the country.

“Israel will not allow the entry of individuals or entities that act against the state and its citizens, promote calls for its boycott, accuse it with false allegations, or call for sanctions against ministers and elected officials,” Israel’s Embassy to the UK posted on X.

“Yesterday, in accordance with the law, two members of the British Parliament were denied entry into Israel by the Minister of Interior of Israel. These individuals had accused Israel of false claims, were actively involved in promoting sanctions against Israeli ministers, and supported campaigns aimed at boycotting the State of Israel.

“The visit was intended to provoke anti-Israel activities at a time when Israel is at war and under attack on seven fronts. Its purpose was to harm Israel and Israeli citizens and spread falsehoods about them”, the statement said.

Diplomatic sources told the JC that Israeli authorities had been unaware of any parliamentary delegation due to come to Israel.

Both MPs have been publicly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Last week, Mohamed claimed that Israel was guilty of ethnic cleansing.

“Israel is now in the process of enacting the largest forced displacement, ordering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Rafah. How will this end? Israel cannot and will not stop. Is the goal ethnic cleansing? We are witnessing that”, she told MPs on Wednesday.

She had made similar accusations during another discussion in January.

The MP for Sheffield Central had also previously argued for a boycott of products from Israeli settlements.
 

A letter signed by 61 parliamentarians, including Mohamed, said: “Israel has developed and maintained its settlements through the forcible eviction and displacement of Palestinians from their homes and the transfer into occupied territory of the population of the occupying state.”

It called on the government to “take measures to ban the import of all goods into the UK made in whole or in part in Israel's illegal settlements.”

During an Urgent Question about the BBC’s documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, taken down after it emerged that its teenage narrator is the son of a senior Hamas official, Yang used the occasion to lament Israeli restrictions on media access to Gaza.

A former journalist for The Economist, she told MPs in February: “My former colleagues have variously been denied entry and had unnecessarily prolonged and risky exits, and our Palestinian contributors have been stuck in a living nightmare.”

In January, she asked Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer about potential sanctions against far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, following their calls for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s decision to bar the MPs entry has been met with mixed reactions across the political spectrum.

Emily Thornberry, chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that Israel was wrong to “humiliate” them.

“In my view, Israel really needs to start making friends as opposed to alienating people in this way”.

Labour Friends of Israel described Israel’s actions as “wrong and counterproductive”.

They added: “Over the years we've taken hundreds of MPs to Israel and Palestine; it's vital parliamentarians are able to visit and understand the situation on the ground. This is a principle we'd hope all political parties would support.”

However, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch appeared to defend Israel’s decision.

She told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips that “every country has a right to defend its own borders, that’s what Israel is doing.”

Although she said she “didn’t know the details” of what Mohamed and Yang were planning to do in Israel, Badenoch hit out at the “repeating of misinformation” by Labour and independent MPs elected on a pro-Gaza platform when it came to talking about Israel.

“I see Labour MPs standing up and saying things that even Keir Starmer has to disagree with and shut down at Prime Minister’s Questions. So I’m not surprised.”