LONDON POLICE WERE forced to intervene after pro-Palestinian protesters mobbed Keir Starmer’s car.
It comes as the UK Labour leader tries to maintain party discipline with members of his frontbench in open revolt about his stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Starmer, who had just delivered a speech defending his approach to the crisis, was ushered into the back of a waiting Land Rover Discovery as protesters shouted at him and demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Police officers pushed them aside, but the protesters ran at the car carrying the Labour leader and drummed on the window.
The incident happened outside the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank in central London, where Starmer had been setting out why he was not demanding an immediate ceasefire.
The Labour leader has resisted pressure from within his own party to call for a ceasefire, instead urging both parties in the conflict to agree to a humanitarian pause to allow aid in and hostages out of the war zone.
This stance has created internal pressure on Starmer, with Shadow ministers among senior Labour figures demanding a change.
Frontbencher Alex Cunningham called for an “immediate ceasefire” less than an hour before Starmer delivered his speech at Chatham House.
Starmer has also been at odds over its stance on Israel with devolved mayors like Manchester’s Andy Burnham and London’s Sadiq Khan, and with Labour-led councils across England.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar also criticised Starmer, claiming he had made “hurtful” comments about the conflict and there was “repair work to do” to mend bridges with Muslim communities.
Starmer insisted he took collective responsibility – the principle that members of his frontbench team adopt a unified position – seriously, but he gave no indication he was about to sack those who had spoken out.
“It is for me to address collective responsibility, I recognise that,” he said.
“It matters and I take that duty extremely seriously, but I put it in the context of understanding what is driving people in the call for a ceasefire, which is in my judgment not the call that we should be making as things stand.”
Starmer insisted there was “unity” in Labour over the “key issues” of seeking a two-state solution, the need to alleviate suffering in Gaza but also Israel’s right to self-defence.
He said his response to the crisis was shaped by responding to both the massacre of Jews in Israel by Hamas and the “humanitarian catastrophe” unfolding in Gaza.
Hamas would be “emboldened” by a ceasefire and start preparing for future violence immediately, the UK Labour leader said.
Starmer said: “While I understand calls for a ceasefire at this stage, I do not believe that it is the correct position now for two reasons.
“One, because a ceasefire always freezes any conflict in the state where it currently lies. And, as we speak, that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the sort of attack we saw on 7 October.
“Attacks that are still ongoing. Hostages who should be released still held.
“Hamas would be emboldened and start preparing for future violence immediately.”
A humanitarian pause is the “only credible approach”, which could see “the urgent alleviation of Palestinian suffering”.
“Aid distributed quickly. Space to get hostages out,” he said.
“And it is why it is also a position shared by our major allies in the US and the EU.”
Starmer said the consequences of events in Israel and Gaza would “last for decades” and “the trauma might never fade”.
There was a “rising temperature on British streets” as a result of the conflict, he acknowledged.
The Hamas attacks were “the biggest slaughter of Jews – and that is why they were killed, do not doubt that – since the Holocaust”.
In an apparent message to his critics in the UK, Starmer said: “This is terrorism on a scale and brutality that few countries have ever experienced, certainly not this one, and that is an immutable fact that must drive our response to these events.”
But the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was also on a “previously unimaginable scale” with “thousands of innocent Palestinians dead, displaced, desperate for food and water, reduced to drinking contaminated filth, hiding out in hospitals for shelter whilst in those same buildings babies lie in incubators that could turn off at any moment”.
Starmer said it was not an “optional extra” for Israel to obey international law in its response to Hamas and the fundamental right to self-defence “is not a blank cheque”.
The Labour leader said supply of water, medicines, electricity and fuel to citizens in Gaza “cannot be blocked by Israel”.
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