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A cross-party coalition of 15 United Kingdom Members of Parliament has formally submitted a letter to the UK government, calling for immediate intervention to block a major upcoming international travel expo in London from featuring promotional activities linked to an Israeli state agency heavily involved in the construction of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. The three-day World Travel Market (WTM) London, one of the global travel industry’s most high-profile annual gatherings, is scheduled to run from 3 to 5 November, with its opening day falling on a Tuesday. As first uncovered by Middle East Eye (MEE) last week, the event’s exhibition floor will host an official stand operated by the Israeli government’s national tourism office, which is co-shared by a network of Israeli commercial and public organizations. One of these featured partners is iTravelJerusalem, a tourism promotion initiative focused on Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem that falls under the oversight of the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA). The JDA, a statutory body jointly governed by the Israeli national government and the Jerusalem municipal authority, leads urban development projects across the city and has been a central operational player in the planning, construction, and ongoing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements built on internationally recognized occupied Palestinian territory. The formal demand for government action was drafted and sent to UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband on Monday by Independent MP Adnan Hussain, and has garnered signatures from a diverse cross-section of parliamentary representatives spanning multiple political parties. Signatories include prominent Labour backbenchers John McDonnell and Kim Johnson, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, all five sitting Green Party MPs (Carla Denyer, Ellie Chownes, Hannah Spencer, Sian Berry, and Adrian Ramsay), three additional Independent MPs (Shockat Adam, Iqbal Mohamed, and Ayoub Khan), and Scottish National Party MP Chris Law. The letter, whose full text was reviewed by MEE, lays out two core explicit requests: first, that the UK government immediately contact WTM London’s event organizers and mandate the full removal of any exhibitor and associated promotional materials whose presence at the expo would enable or advance the normalization of illegal Israeli settlements; and second, that ministers provide formal confirmation of concrete, actionable steps being taken to enforce the UK’s existing ban on the advertising of illegal settlements, rather than leaving the policy as a series of unenforced verbal commitments delivered only during parliamentary debates. The coordinated parliamentary push comes in the wake of a landmark policy announcement made by the UK government just one month prior, in which officials formally recognized Israel’s long-running occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and unveiled a sweeping new package of sanctions targeting Israeli settlement operations. The letter’s signatories emphasize that the UK government cannot maintain any credible moral or political standing if it continues to publicly condemn the forced displacement of Palestinian communities, acknowledge the risk of ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestinian territories, and publicly vow to ban the promotion of illegal settlements on UK soil, while simultaneously permitting organizations directly implicated in these contested activities to leverage a high-profile international event hosted in central London to advance their work. To back up their demands, the MPs cite a 2025 official report published by the Office of the European Union Representative for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which documents the JDA’s formal plans to evict roughly 40 Palestinian families from the Umm Haroun compound in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make way for a new 320-unit illegal settlement development. Additional documented JDA projects referenced in the letter include a 2020 Israeli government-approved Jerusalem cable car scheme that would require mass uprooting of local trees and the demolition of critical Palestinian civilian infrastructure including water, sewage, and telecommunications lines, as well as a planned large-scale settlement housing development directly adjacent to the Palestinian residential community of Beit Safafa in East Jerusalem. Palestinian Ambassador to the UK Hussam Zomlot issued a public statement responding to MEE’s initial reporting last Thursday, criticizing the upcoming WTM event for granting a platform to Israeli entities that he described as complicit in ethnic cleansing, and urging the UK government to translate its previously stated policy commitments into tangible enforcement that imposes real consequences for parties involved in illegal occupation and settlement activity. In their closing message to Foreign Secretary Miliband, the 15 MPs note that they will not accept a perfunctory response that merely restates the UK government’s existing public position, and demand a detailed, urgent reply outlining specific actionable steps that will be taken before WTM London opens its doors to attendees. “The question is no longer simply what the Government believes, but whether it is prepared to act on what it has said,” the letter stresses. As of the time of MEE’s publication, requests for comment submitted to both WTM London event organizers and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had not received a formal response.

The UK’s ruling Labour Party has formally severed collaborative governing ties with the Green Party across 11 local authorities in England, in direct response to a landmark policy passed by the Greens at their October annual party conference that labels Zionism as a form of racism. The vote by Green activists made the party the first major UK political group to formally adopt that stance, alongside a policy shift backing a single, inclusive democratic Palestinian state with equal rights for all ethnic and religious communities, replacing the longstanding two-state solution framework that has dominated mainstream UK political discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Labour Party chair Bridget Phillipson laid out the party’s firm position in an official statement, emphasizing that the Green motion on Zionism had crossed an unnegotiable moral boundary. “No local power-sharing arrangement can ever justify abandoning the moral duty we hold to stand up for every member of our communities and the shared anti-racist values that define our party,” Phillipson stated. “We cannot collaborate at any level of governance with a party that endorses this divisive, discriminatory policy.” Prime Minister Andy Burnham had previously publicly denounced the Green policy as antisemitic shortly after it was passed last month.

The 11 councils where all joint working agreements with Greens will immediately cease are Arun, Derbyshire Dales, Havant, Lewes, Sheffield, Stafford, Warwick, Wealden, West Devon, and West Suffolk. Labour noted that six local Green council groups, based in Broadland, Monmouthshire, North Somerset, Rother, West Oxfordshire, and West Sussex, have already publicly rejected the national party’s new motion, a move that Phillipson’s team described as a “right and appropriate” stance. The party added that it was “disappointed” other local Green branches had declined to disavow the policy as required under Labour’s terms for continued collaboration, and called on the Green Party’s national leadership to formally rescind the motion entirely.

In an official response, the Green Party pushed back against Labour’s move, arguing that cross-party local partnerships between Greens, Labour, independents, and Liberal Democrats have long delivered stable, effective local governance, protected critical public services, and delivered tangible improvements for residents across the country. The party accused Labour leadership of issuing arbitrary ultimatums that undermined the judgment of their own local elected representatives, disrespected the will of local voters who had backed cross-party collaborative governance, and disrupted long-running successful community-focused initiatives.

Zack Polanski, the Jewish deputy leader of the Green Party, warned on Monday that Labour’s decision to end local power-sharing deals would ultimately backfire on the ruling party. “Our party is focused on delivering policies to tax billionaires, tackle the accelerating climate crisis, and end arms sales that are enabling ongoing genocide in Gaza,” Polanski said. “Labour’s choice to disrupt local public services to enforce their policy of supporting that genocide at the local level lays bare the true priorities of Andy Burnham and his administration.” The Green Party had previously hit back at Burnham’s earlier criticism of the motion, stating that it would refuse to take lectures on antisemitism from a government that continues to supply military hardware to the state of Israel.

Tensions between the United States and Iran escalated sharply over a recent weekend, as senior officials from both sides traded public threats, while reports emerged that the Trump administration was weighing new military strikes on a subterranean site Washington claims houses Iranian nuclear facilities – a categorization Tehran has repeatedly and emphatically rejected. Amid mounting alarm over the widening conflict, critics of the ongoing U.S.-led military campaign against Iran are calling on Democratic lawmakers to take immediate, decisive legislative action to de-escalate and end the war, following the conclusion of Tuesday’s midterm elections, where the Democratic Party is positioned to seize control of one or both chambers of the U.S. Congress.
Leading the advocacy push is the nonpartisan peace organization Just Foreign Policy (JFP), which highlighted recent public remarks from Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who confirmed that members of Congress had received a closed-door, classified briefing detailing potential new aerial strikes on Iran in the immediate aftermath of the midterms – a contingency plan Murphy openly dismissed as fundamentally “insane” due to its catastrophic regional and domestic ripple effects.
As prior reporting from Common Dreams outlined last Friday, Iranian authorities have already launched public preparedness campaigns to inform their 90 million citizens of protocols to follow in the event of a direct U.S. nuclear attack, a scenario former President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened since he launched the preemptive U.S. military campaign against Iran in February. Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously confirmed that the war was initiated with the stated goal of defending Israel from potential Iranian retaliation in the event that Israeli forces launched their own unilateral strike on Iranian territory.
Over the weekend, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a stark public warning to Washington and Jerusalem, cautioning that any new offensive attacks would be met with “geographically unrestricted” retaliation across the region. Even so, Khamenei struck a cautious diplomatic tone the following day, voicing hope that U.S. leadership would demonstrate rationality and prioritize negotiated dialogue over further military confrontation.
Advocacy groups argue that Democrats hold significant legislative leverage to choke off war funding before the 2026 calendar year draws to a close, pointing to a fast-approaching December 11 deadline for the expiration of federal government funding, which includes allocated budgets for the U.S. Department of Defense. JFP’s statement condemned the ongoing U.S. military campaign as illegal, noting that it has inflicted widespread harm on Iranian civilians via sustained bombing campaigns and naval blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, while also driving unprecedented spikes in domestic gasoline prices that have imposed severe financial strain on 300 million U.S. drivers.
“Senate Democrats must not allocate a single additional dollar to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war department unless the U.S. immediately halts this illegal conflict that is harming tens of millions of people on both sides of the conflict,” JFP stated firmly. “No excuses. Not one more dollar for this illegal, unprovoked war.”
The group’s policy recommendations align closely with remarks Murphy delivered at a public event hosted by the Middle East Institute the prior Wednesday, where he laid out a clear legislative roadmap for leveraging congressional spending authority to end the hostilities. “I anticipate that in the immediate aftermath of the election, lawmakers will pass a short-term continuing resolution to push full federal budget negotiations into January or February of next year,” Murphy explained. “If Democrats hold the majority in either chamber at that point, we will make it very clear that we are prepared to fund core Department of Defense operations, but we will not approve any DOD budget that allocates resources to continue this war against Iran – a conflict that has made the American public demonstrably less safe and cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars with no clear strategic endgame.”
JFP further emphasized that Democrats do not even need to win a full congressional majority in Tuesday’s midterms to block war funding. Under the existing Republican-held Senate majority, Republican leadership would require the support of at least seven Democratic senators to pass any continuing resolution to fund the federal government and extend war operations into February, giving even a minority Democratic caucus the power to filibuster or block the measure outright. “Democrats have the power to block Iran war funding in 2026, and they do not need to win a majority or wait for the new congressional session to act,” JFP noted, adding that Murphy’s previously floated proposal to temporarily extend war funding for several months would be an unacceptable compromise.
One independent foreign policy commentator went a step further, arguing that a strong Democratic electoral mandate rejecting the unconstitutional war would justify even more aggressive action. “If voters deliver a clear blue wave rebuke of this patently illegal war, and Trump responds to the midterms by escalating hostilities, Democrats should move immediately to block all war funding and initiate impeachment proceedings against him for exceeding his executive authority,” the commentator said. “Voting to enable this ongoing conflict would be a corrupt abdication of their constitutional duty to oversee U.S. military engagements.”
Separate reporting from Al Jazeera on Sunday confirmed that Iranian diplomatic officials are still holding quiet, indirect negotiations with U.S. counterparts via Qatari mediators, but a senior Iranian security source noted that Tehran holds “not the slightest optimism about Trump’s intentions even for a moment.” “We recognize there are divergent voices within the U.S. political system, but years of experience have shown that the president and his inner circle are fully beholden to the demands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the hawkish, pro-war extremist factions that back him,” the source explained. “For that reason, we have no choice but to maintain full, unwavering preparedness to launch a decisive, punitive defensive response to any act of aggression committed by the United States or Israel.”

In a stunning last-minute political twist just days out from Michigan’s high-profile U.S. Senate general election, incumbent Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens — who was defeated by progressive challenger Abdul El-Sayed in the party’s primary earlier this cycle — has formally thrown her support behind Republican nominee Mike Rogers, rather than backing the Democratic standard-bearer she lost to. The announcement, which Stevens shared via a public video post on X Sunday, came immediately after she made an unannounced joint appearance alongside Rogers at a Detroit-area church, and marks the latest explosive escalation of a months-long intra-party feud rooted in divergent stances on the Israeli war in Gaza. Stevens, who has long received financial and organizational backing from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, framed her break from the Democratic ticket as a deliberate rejection of El-Sayed’s platform. In her public remarks, she claimed she had no place in El-Sayed’s campaign, and argued that Michigan’s core values stand in direct opposition to what she characterized as hateful rhetoric coming from her former primary rival. For his part, Rogers is a staunchly conservative, hardline Trump ally who has pledged full loyalty to the former president’s policy agenda if elected to the Senate. El-Sayed, a prominent progressive public health advocate, has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which he has repeatedly labeled a genocide. The unusual cross-party endorsement has sent shockwaves through Democratic ranks at both the state and national level, prompting swift, fiery condemnation from top party leadership. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced Stevens’ move in no uncertain terms, calling it a despicable betrayal of the party’s values and electoral goals. Michigan Democratic Party chair Curtis Hertel released a scathing statement slamming Stevens for aligning herself with a candidate he accused of consistently betraying Michigan’s working-class communities, supporting a nationwide abortion ban, and vowing to rubber-stamp every piece of Trump’s legislative agenda. Hertel added that the state party was rejecting efforts by Stevens and other bad-faith actors to sow division among Democratic voters, and pledged that the eleventh-hour controversy would not derail the party’s campaign momentum. In a notable contrast to the heated backlash from party leaders, El-Sayed has opted to avoid engaging in public mudslinging over the endorsement. Citing remarks first reported by the New York Times, the progressive nominee stated that the entire controversy is irrelevant to what Michigan voters care about, and emphasized that he is refusing all distractions to keep the campaign focused on the policy priorities that matter to local residents. National election analysts have repeatedly ranked Michigan’s 2024 Senate contest as one of the most competitive and consequential races of the entire electoral cycle, with the outcome widely expected to play a decisive role in determining which party controls the U.S. Senate for the next legislative session.