‘Action is now needed’: Over 60 ex-UK ambassadors call to sanction Israel over West Bank
Pro-Palestinian activists protest against Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians convicted in military courts of deadly attacks, in London, March 2026
Ben Kroll reports in Haaretz on 26 April 2026:
Over 60 former senior British diplomats and ambassadors have penned an open letter warning against Israeli annexation of the West Bank, urging the U.K. government to ban all trade with Israeli settlements and review its trade ties with Jerusalem.
Published Friday in the Financial Times, the former diplomats – most of whom served as ambassadors to Middle Eastern states – warned that while international attention is focused on Iran and Lebanon, Israel “extends control over the West Bank and Gaza. Its accelerating annexation is unmistakable.”
In their letter, the former envoys cite recent calls to suspend the European Union-Israel Association Agreement, which governs political and economic ties between the two. Earlier this month, hundreds of former EU ministers, ambassadors and other senior officials called for its suspension, arguing that Israel had violated a human rights provision in the agreement.
The British diplomats say Israel is violating the same clause in the U.K.-Israel agreement. “Israel is in breach of both,” they wrote.
The letter cites three specific examples of alleged Israeli breaches: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for a “discriminatory death penalty bill, which applies only to Palestinians”; his request that the Red Cross assist in securing the release of Gaza hostages while refusing to grant access to Palestinians held in Israeli prisons; and what the diplomats described as “systematic, state-supported settler violence and ethnic cleansing [that] are rampant in the West Bank.”
The letter also cites Israel’s move to bisect the West Bank through settlement construction in the highly contentious E1 area near Jerusalem, noting that Britain should warn potential bidders on the project “that they will endanger their business interests in and with the U.K. if they proceed.”
Noting that Prime Minister Keir Starmer is seeking to bring the U.K. closer to the EU, the diplomats wrote that “Britain and its European partners should ban all settlement trade goods and services, including investment and insurance and review those agreements with Israel.”
Vincent Fean, who served as Consul General in Jerusalem between 2010 and 2014, is the lead signatory on the Financial Times piece. Among the more than 60 additional signatories are former ambassadors to the U.S., John Kerr and David Manning, as well as Frances Guy, the former British ambassador to Lebanon.
“Israel’s settlements project aims to kill the viability of a Palestinian state,” they wrote. “Mere words of condemnation are ignored. While the world is distracted, grave contraventions of international law continue in occupied Palestine,” the diplomats added, saying that “government action is now needed.”
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