London, Jan 29, IRNA — The British government has rejected growing calls to withdraw its ambassador fom Tel Aviv in protest to Israel’s latest slaughter of more than 1,300 Palestinians, including over 400 children, in Gaza.
“The government do not believe that such a move would help advance our objective of an immediate and sustainable ceasefire,” Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown said in a written parliamentary reply published Thursday.
The latest call was made by independent peer, Lord Dyke, who was sacked as director general of the BBC in 2004 in the wake of the corporation being the first to report that the UK government exaggerated Saddam Hussein’s arms threat to justify the Iraq war.
Malloch-Brown also dismissed a separate call from Dyke to impose an full arms embargo on Israel amid reports that British military equipment has been used by Israel during its blitzkrieg attacks on Gaza.
“We already routinely refuse export licenses where we believe there is a clear risk that they will be used for external aggression or internal repression,” he insisted.
But the minister hinted that the UK may tighten its restrictions, adding that “as with all conflicts, we will take into account the recent conflict and the conduct and methods of the Israeli Defence Force in that conflict in the assessment of future export licences.”
The government also received a fresh barrage of calls from peers to ensure that Israel to brought to account for misusing white phosphorus shells on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
“Gaza is an exceptionally densely populated area where white phosphorus used as an air burst is liable to cause particularly horrific injuries to non-combatants. We consider such use in these circumstances unacceptable,” Malloch-Brown said.
Some 75 MPs have already expressed their “alarm” about the use of white phosphorus by the Israeli defence forces in Gaza and warning about its indiscriminate nature in an Early Day Motion (EDM) to the House of Commons.
The MPs said they were “seriously concerned that due to medical shortages and a severe shortage of water, medics within the Gaza Strip lack the capabilities to alleviate the suffering of civilians who may have been affected.”
Another EDM calls on the UK government to “propose a resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling on the Security Council to refer allegations of war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza to the International Criminal Court.”