What is David Lammy talking about?
Posted: 24th July 2025
What is David Lammy talking about?
UK foreign secretary David Lammy has been doing the media round this week, seeking to justify the UK government’s unjustifiable approach towards the Gaza genocide.
In other weeks, Lammy might have sent his lieutenant, Foreign Office minister for the Middle East Hamish Falconer, to do the talking for him.
Indeed, it is often Falconer who gets trotted out to parliament to answer the awkward questions about Britain’s military, intelligence, economic, and political support to Israel.
But the stakes for the UK government now seem unavoidably high.
On 9 July, eleven UN experts issued a mayday warning about famine in Gaza. “We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza”, they wrote.
International media organisations are now warning that their journalists in Gaza are starving to death – an unprecedented development in recent history. “We refuse to watch them die”, the French press agency AFPdeclared.
The BBC has now issued a joint statement alongside AFP and Reuters, saying: “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.
The British press has also apparently finally awoken to the reality of the situation in Gaza, with even the right-wing Daily Express calling for Israel to allow aid into the strip.
“For pity’s sake stop this now”, the newspaper’s front page read this week. “The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all”.
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Yet Lammy’s media round has done little to comfort concerned citizens as they see daily updates on Palestinians starving to death. Indeed, his comments have only led to widespread anger and confusion.
On Tuesday, the foreign secretary was asked on BBC Radio 4 whether information from RAF surveillance flights over Gaza was being shared with the Israeli military to help them conduct their war in Gaza.
“No”, said Lammy. “We are not assisting, and it would be quite wrong for the British government to assist in the prosecution of this war in Gaza. We are not doing that, and we would never do that”, he added.
What is he talking about?
Defence ministers have repeatedly told parliament that “information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant [Israeli] authorities”, with Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly stating that hostage recovery is one of Israel’s central war aims.
Is Lammy therefore misleading the public, or does he mean to say that none of the over 500 spy flights sent over Gaza since December 2023 have found any information worth sharing?
Whatever the case, we can be confident that the government’s efforts to cover its own back will become increasingly desperate and nonsensical as political and media opinion belatedly turns against Israel.
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