Andy Burnham apologised<\/a> for Labour’s response to Israel’s military invasion of Gaza, saying the party “didn’t get it right”.<\/p>\nBurnham, who is expected to become prime minister later this month, was one of several high-profile Labour figures who were calling for a ceasefire in Gaza by late October 2023.<\/p>\n
“Labour’s initial response to the treatment of Gaza caused huge hurt. We got it wrong and I am sorry for that,” he wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
In a video message, the Makerfield MP also reiterated his condemnation of the 7 October Hamas attack, as well as antisemitic attacks in the UK.<\/p>\n
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster programme, Lammy said what Sir Keir had said about the Gaza conflict in an LBC interview “came out all wrong”.<\/p>\n
In the interview, Sir Keir was asked whether it was “appropriate” for Israel to cut off the supply of power and water to Gaza.<\/p>\n
“I think that Israel does have that right,” he said. “Obviously everything should be done within international law, but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has a right to defend herself.”<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Labour leader later said he had only meant to say Israel had a general right to self-defence.<\/p>\n
Lammy said: “The PM in that LBC interview\u2026 got us off to a bad start in opposition and I think he’s acknowledged that and that’s definitely the case.”<\/p>\n
In February 2024, Labour called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza for the first time since the outbreak of the conflict the previous October.<\/p>\n
The UK formally recognised the state of Palestine in September 2025, in a move announced by Sir Keir.<\/p>\n
“So I think in office we did a lot, but clearly those initial steps were problematic,” Lammy said.<\/p>\n
When asked if Sir Keir got too sucked into foreign policy to the detriment of domestic issues in the country, Lammy said the “two are indivisible”.<\/p>\n
He said the cost-of-living crisis “has been driven in part by a pandemic, then by the war in Ukraine, now by the problems in the Strait of Hormuz”.<\/p>\n
“I think there’s a trend right across the Western world for leaders to end up spending much more time on foreign policy than they’d hoped,” Lammy said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said Labour’s initial response to the Gaza conflict was “problematic” and Sir…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-685154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}