Lisa Nandy urges support for UN relief agency for Palestinians

Lisa Nandy was in Washington to explain how the UK’s humanitarian and development policy will change if Labour forms the next government. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA

Lisa Nandy, the UK’s shadow minister for international development, has called for support for the UN relief agency, Unrwa, warning “time has run out for hundreds of thousands” of Gazans.

Nandy is in Washington this week attending the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with a message of how the UK’s humanitarian and development policy will change if Labour, as expected, form the next government by the end of this year.

However, she accepted that she would have to address widespread perceptions across the global south of Britain’s unreliability as a partner and its double standards on the world stage, an image exacerbated by the Gaza war and the consequent famine rolling over the Palestinian coastal strip.

Nandy said: “We are getting a very strong message that people feel there are different rules for different countries, which is problematic and something that we’ll have to deal with if we’re fortunate enough to be in government.”

She promised more consistent UK support for international legal institutions like the international criminal court (ICC) and the international court of justice (ICJ) and said Israel should be held accountable before both tribunals for its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Nandy outlined ways in which Labour policy on Israel and Gaza would differ starkly from the current government’s, starting with actions to address a famine, which international experts and US officials say has already begun.

The UK is one of the few major donors, alongside the US, that has yet to resume funding of Unrwa. The financing was originally cut off in January after Israeli allegations of links between some Unrwa staff and Hamas, which remain unproven. Since then Australia, Sweden, Finland, France, Canada and the European Commission have all resumed funding.

UK ministers say they will make a decision on the resumption of funding after seeing the final report from a review of Unrwa neutrality led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, which is expected early next week.

Nandy said the UK funding continued to be withheld “despite the fact that the government is aware that if Unrwa can’t continue its operations, the whole humanitarian system in Gaza collapses”.

“So there’s new urgency to this now. Time has run out for hundreds of thousands of people across Gaza and the world has to act,” Nandy said. All Gaza’s 2.3 million population suffer food insecurity and nearly half face famine, according to expert assessments.

Israeli authorities are refusing to deal with Unrwa although it is by far the biggest aid agency in Gaza, and has helped support Palestinian refugees across the region for more than seven decades. The Israeli government is pressing for Unrwa’s functions, staff and resources to be transferred instead to a new agency.

“It is just completely unrealistic to suggest that there can be a humanitarian response in Gaza without Unrwa and the critical role that it plays,” Nandy said. “All the agencies, including the UK agencies, that work in Gaza rely on its infrastructure, and staff and expertise in order to deliver aid.”

In contrast to the current government, Labour fully supports the work of the ICC, which investigates potential war crimes in Gaza, and the ICJ, which is weighing accusations of genocide against Israel and examining the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation of Palestinian territories.

Britain’s Conservative government has backed the ICC and ICJ scrutiny of Russian actions in Ukraine, but not of Israeli conduct in Gaza.

Nandy said a critical difference between Labour and the Tories on Israel and the occupied territories is “we are crystal clear that unless international law is upheld, there can be no accountability.

“If there is no accountability, then this is how you end up with a situation where the two-state solution has disappeared before people’s eyes and there is no hope of a meaningful peace process,” Nandy.

Labour has called for Israel to implement the “provisional measures” ordered by the ICJ in late January, intended to mitigate the risk of genocide.

Labour is also calling for the British government to make public its internal legal assessment of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, and so that parliament can take a view on whether British arms exports should be suspended. The foreign secretary, David Cameron, said in Washington last week that the latest legal assessment “leaves our position on export licences unchanged” but argued that legal advice should be kept confidential.

Nandy acknowledged there could be legitimate reasons for keeping legal advice secret, but added: “It seems to us that the greater degree of transparency that can be provided in this situation, the better.

“Both the Israelis and the Palestinians know that we don’t just want to see greater access to aid but that there are international rules and laws that have to be applied,” she said.

Rishi Sunak’s government is threatening to ignore international law in its effort to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and has threatened to repeal the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights, policies Labour has pledged to overturn.

“I think the biggest problem is the suspicion from many countries that Britain, this government in particular, doesn’t respect international law and international norms,” Nandy said. “And that’s something that a Labour government will have to restore.”