The audience at a hard-left political festival that takes place each year alongside the Labour Party conference cheered and applauded a speaker who celebrated the Hamas attack on Israel.

Sunday’s “World Transformed” even was held in Liverpool shortly after the Labour conference opened on Sunday afternoon by an offshoot of the Momentum faction that supported Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader.

The applause came in response to a speech by Hannah Elsouda, a UK-based member of the Palestinian Youth Movement.

She said she was “proud to be speaking at such an historic moment”, adding that “our Palestinian resistance has once again taken the failed Zionist entity by surprise and has declared enough is enough”.

Elsouda was cheered a second time when she said that “the Palestinian resistance crossed the fence that contained more than a million refugees … so are we only willing to support Palestinians rising up when they are held at the fence and shot down?

“Or are we serious about the return, the liberation of colonised lands? These are the questions of our time and we have a responsibility to rise up and do the bare minimum, a colonise people’s right to resist.” 

Earlier in the day Corbyn, who remains a party member although he has been denied the Labour whip,  was asked by journalists for his reaction to the Hamas terror attacks.

Corbyn GettyImages-1248028310

Jeremy Corbyn (Getty Images)

He would say only: “Yesterday I sent out a statement calling for a ceasefire, calling for peace and calling for an end to the occupation of Palestine which, of course, is fundamentally the background to the whole issue. Obviously all attacks are wrong.”

Corbyn’s successor Sir Keir Starmer unequivocally condemned what he called the “acts of terrorism” by Hamas, saying they were trying to wreck any chance of peace.