Lammy handing Hamas a get-out card is an utter disgrace
In the parallel universe occupied by our Foreign Secretary, it is seemingly not Hamas that started the war in Gaza by carrying out the worst massacre in Israel's history or bears responsibility for failing to agree a lasting ceasefire. It is not the terrorists who are to be blamed for disrupting the aid supply lines that are essential to preventing a humanitarian disaster.
Instead, Lammy believes that the enduring catastrophe that has engulfed Gaza since the October 7 attacks in 2023 is the fault of the Israeli government and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Commenting after the UK had joined 27 other countries, including Canada, France and Australia, in issuing a statement condemning Israel for depriving Palestinians in Gaza of their 'human dignity', Lammy's hyperbole knew no bounds as he declared he was 'sickened, appalled' by Israel's conduct and its 'grotesque' targeting of starving Palestinians.
Lamenting the fact that the UK had neither the power nor influence to end the conflict, he warned he was prepared to impose further sanctions against Israel if hostilities did not end soon.
Throughout this seemingly endless anti-Israel diatribe on the BBC, at no point did Lammy make any reference to Hamas, and the pernicious role the group has played in wilfully disrupting aid supplies to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There was no condemnation of the campaign of tyranny Hamas continues to exercise over Gaza's civilian population, nor any mention of freezing the assets of the wealthy Hamas terrorist masterminds holed up in Qatar.
This is despite mounting evidence that the Iranian-backed terrorist group is deliberately exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the enclave for its own propaganda purposes.
Hamas has been accused of targeting Palestinian civilians trying to obtain food and medical supplies provided by the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. This is an aid organisation set up as an alternative to the UN-sponsored UNWRA, whose humanitarian efforts have been compromised by their links to Hamas. Videos are circulating online showing Hamas terrorists rounding up recipients of US aid, with some of them being tortured and killed.
Meanwhile Israeli officials have released evidence that suggests that, far from blocking supplies, Israel has allowed 950 trucks to cross into Gaza to deliver aid, and the reason it has not been distributed is because too many of the UN-sponsored aid agencies are too busy criticising the Israelis to bother collecting it.
In an active war zone like Gaza it is difficult to verify these conflicting narratives. But, at the very least, it is incumbent on the UK and other Western governments to try to bring some semblance of balance and proportion to highly inflammatory allegations, such as the claim that Israel is deliberately causing mass starvation among Palestinian civilians.
This is clearly beyond Lammy's diplomatic skill set, with the Foreign Secretary apparently more interested in virtue signalling to Labour's hard-Left anti-Israel lobby than making any coherent effort to address the broader, and more complex, challenges raised by the Gaza crisis.
By doing so, he is essentially propagating the same twisted anti-Israel agenda promoted by supporters of Palestine Action, the direct action group that Lammy and his ministerial colleagues have just proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
No wonder the Israelis have responded to the latest international condemnation of their actions by Lammy and Co as being 'disconnected from reality'.
If Britain and its co-signatories are genuinely committed to an 'unconditional and permanent ceasefire' in Gaza, as the statement insists, then they should concentrate their efforts on forcing Hamas and its backers in Iran to acknowledge the inevitable, and accept that the terrorist organisation's continued presence in Gaza must end.
One of the biggest obstacles to the Trump administration's attempts to broker a lasting ceasefire in Gaza has been Hamas's determination to maintain operations in Gaza, irrespective of the scale of the defeat they suffer at the hands of the Israelis.
If Hamas emerges from the conflict with just a fraction of its pre-war terrorist infrastructure intact, it will hail the achievement as a major victory.
Israel, like any other country that has suffered atrocities on the scale committed on October 7, insists there will be no peace in Gaza so long as Hamas remains an active presence in the enclave.
Allowing Hamas to retain any vestige of influence in the territory would simply place the Israeli people at risk of suffering yet another cataclysmic terrorist attack, which is why Netanyahu is so insistent that there can be no peace in Gaza so long as Hamas remains.
The key to implementing a lasting ceasefire in Gaza is not indulging in more, utterly pointless, anti-Israel Lammyesque stunts. It is forcing Hamas and its backers that its reign of terror in the enclave is well and truly over.
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