Foreign Secretary David Lammy has claimed that referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide takes away from the seriousness of atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.

In Parliament on Monday, Conservative MP Nick Timothy attacked Labour MPs who he argued had claimed “that Israel is somehow conducting a war of annihilation, extermination and genocide”.

The MP for West Suffolk said the dehumanising language was being “repeated by the protesters and lawbreakers who are intimidating British Jews, as we saw again this weekend”, thought to be a reference to this weekend’s protests outside JW3. He urged Lammy “to say that there is not a genocide occurring in the Middle East”.

The Foreign Secretary responded by saying that terms like genocide are “legal terms, and they must be determined by international courts” before agreeing with Timothy that “those terms were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises such as Rwanda and the Holocaust of the Second World War. The way that people are now using those terms undermines their seriousness.”

Lammy was making a statement in the House of Commons on developments in the Middle East, following Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Iran on Friday night.

He told MPs: “the government unequivocally condemn Iranian attacks on Israel. This government have imposed three rounds of sanctions on Iranian individuals and organisations responsible for malign activity, most recently on 14 October, and we have consistently supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Iranian attacks and attacks by Iranian-backed terrorists, whose goal is the complete eradication of the Israeli state.

"We do not mourn the deaths of the heads of proscribed terrorist organisations.”

However, he urged both Israel and Iran to refrain from further escalation.

Addressing the situation in Northern Gaza, the scene of recent Israeli military activity, Lammy described conditions there as “devastating” and condemned Israeli restrictions on the movement of aid. He said there was “no excuse for the Israeli government’s ongoing restrictions on humanitarian assistance; they must let more aid in now”.

The Foreign Secretary added that the restrictions “fly in the face of Israel’s public commitments”. They “risk violating international humanitarian law” and “are a rebuke to every friend of Israel, who month after month have demanded action to address the catastrophic conditions facing Palestinian civilians,” he said.

The government has been under pressure from some Labour MPs who have been demanding tougher action against Israel.

Earlier this month, over 20 Labour MPs backed a motion calling to end “all military exports to Israel.”

One of those, Middlesborough and Thornaby East MP Andy McDonald, described Israel’s actions in northern Gaza as a genocide. He said in response to an Urgent Question on October 15 that “The sight of a patient on an IV drip burning to death in the flames of an airstrike on the tents of refugees will be the abiding image of this genocide.”