Who Does Wes Streeting Think He’s Fooling on Gaza?

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” These were words posted on X by Canadian writer Omar El Akkad in October 2023 over a video of the devastated ruins of Gaza. A shorter version of this statement became the title of his 2025 book.

El Akkad’s observation has proved apt this week as we watched two Labour heavyweights attempt to rewrite history on their positions while Israel carried out its genocide. Interestingly, neither of them has found the courage to use the word genocide. But this is Keir Starmer’s party, after all, and we really have to manage our expectations.

At a Westminster event on Monday, Emily Thornberry spoke of her pride in Britain “always” realising the “importance of international law”. To this rage-bait statement she added: “But when it comes to our record on Palestine, I am afraid we have fallen well short and in doing so we have failed the Palestinian people.”

This is the same Thornberry who, while shadow attorney general, refused to say whether cutting off food, water and power to people in Gaza was against international law. Spoiler: it is. According to Thornberry, however, “Israel has a right to defend itself”.

Then, on Tuesday, former health secretary Wes Streeting told the Guardian he was “horrified by the war in Gaza”, claiming that he “did everything [he] could behind the scenes to get the government to act”, including sharing a dossier of eyewitness testimony from doctors on the ground with his cabinet colleagues.

While I really hate to sound cynical, I can’t help but wonder if there could possibly be some job openings at the very top of the party of government on the cards?

Remember that in 2023, Streeting rejected calls for a ceasefire and told those advocating for one that they needed to be “realistic”, while toeing the party line on pushing for the cowardly obfuscation of ‘humanitarian pauses’. Months later, he dubbed South Africa’s comprehensive genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) a “distraction”.

By July 2025, Streeting was privately recognising that “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes”. But he never made a public statement, and didn’t resign his cabinet position over his government’s complicity in the genocide – in Israel’s unrelenting atrocities, the damage or destruction of every single hospital in Gaza, or the kids having their limbs amputated without anesthetic. He did, however, resign earlier this year after some bad local election results.

South Africa’s application to the ICJ stated: “South Africa is also acutely aware of its own obligation – as a state party to the Genocide Convention – to prevent genocide.”

By contrast, the government and its senior cabinet ministers failed in every single legal obligation under treaty and international law. It has been complicit, and also – as Jeremy Corbyn’s Gaza tribunal found in March – an active participant in Israel’s live-streamed genocide.

Now, over 72,000 Palestinians are dead. This figure, expected to be a severe undercount, includes more than 21,000 children who died in agony, were obliterated in their beds, or were simply “evaporated” by thermal and thermobaric weapons.

Streeting’s recent statement follows the disclosure of messages from disgraced former ambassador Peter Mandelson, who, when he wasn’t helping to embed Palantir in the British state, was calling concern about war crimes “hysterical” and “pathetic”. While it’s easy for Streeting – a member of Labour Friends of Israel who has taken thousands from pro-Israel lobbyist Sir Trevor Chinn – to pitch himself as a the voice of morality next to a pal of Jeffrey Epstein, the bar really is through the floor.

These are moves that reek of cowardice and opportunism, intended to help anoint would-be prime ministers and tee-up candidates for top spots in a new cabinet. Streeting will also be painfully aware that he’s hanging by a thread in his Ilford North constituency, where he came within 600 votes of losing to pro-Palestine independent Leanne Mohamad in 2024.

Labour chose to remake itself as the party of genocide over the bodies of Palestinians. I’m not buying the crocodile tears.