分类： politics

### Keir Starmer Outlines Plan to Proscribe Iran’s IRGC After Arson Attack on London Synagogue
During a visit to a London synagogue targeted in an arson attack linked to suspected Iranian-aligned actors, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has publicly committed to advancing legislation that would ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the first weeks of the upcoming new parliamentary session. The announcement comes as the country grapples with a rising tide of antisemitic violence targeting Jewish community sites, and as Starmer’s Labour government faces mounting political headwinds just two weeks out from nationwide local elections.
Speaking alongside Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis at Kenton United Synagogue, Starmer opened by emphasizing deep alarm over the growing presence of hostile, Iran-supported groups carrying out coordinated attacks on UK soil. “I am very worried about the influence of Iran-backed groups carrying out attacks in the UK,” the prime minister stated during the visit. Two teenagers, aged 17 and 19, have already been taken into custody in connection with the Kenton synagogue arson, which authorities are investigating as a potential antisemitic and state-aligned attack.
When pressed by attendees on whether a proscription order for the IRGC would move forward, Starmer clarified that formal banning of the organization requires new parliamentary legislation, a step his administration intends to introduce immediately after the opening of the next parliamentary session in coming weeks. “In relation to malign state actors more generally, proscription does need legislation in order to take necessary measures, and that is legislation that we’re bringing forward as soon as we can,” he explained. “We go into a new session in a few weeks’ time, and we’ll bring that legislation forward.”
The arson attack on the Kenton synagogue is one of a string of recent assaults on Jewish cultural and religious centers across the UK, a surge that has sparked urgent alarm over the security of the country’s estimated 260,000-strong Jewish community. Many political commentators and senior officials have drawn a connection between these attacks and escalating regional tensions stemming from the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. An online group calling itself Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has claimed responsibility for the string of attacks, though analysts have yet to independently verify the group’s claimed ties to Iran or the authenticity of its claim.
Starmer highlighted ongoing law enforcement action to address the violence, noting that counter-terrorism police are working in close partnership with the Community Security Trust (CST), the leading Jewish community safety organization, to hold perpetrators accountable. “It’s very important that we’re able to show the criminal justice system can react effectively and efficiently here,” he said, adding that eight suspects have already been charged and one person convicted in connection with recent attacks.
As of publication, Middle East Eye has not received a response from the UK Home Office to requests for confirmation on whether preliminary steps to proscribe the IRGC have already been initiated. Requests for comment were also sent to the Iranian Embassy in London, with no reply received.
The prime minister’s synagogue visit unfolds against a backdrop of severe political vulnerability for his Labour government. Two weeks prior to nationwide local elections, multiple polls and political analysts forecast that Labour will face heavy losses to a array of competing parties, including the left-wing Green Party, right-wing Reform UK, and regional nationalist parties. Compounding this pressure is an ongoing political scandal tied to the appointment of Peter Mandelson, a former senior Labour figure with documented ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as UK ambassador to the United States. Multiple British media outlets have reported that widespread election losses could force Starmer to step down from his post.
Political observers point to the UK government’s unwavering support for Israel amid the ongoing military campaign in Gaza as one of the core factors driving a sharp decline in public support for Labour across the country.

In an incident that has ignited fierce debate over civil liberties and state overreach in Israel, a Jewish academic was detained by Israeli police last week for wearing a traditional kippah embroidered with both the Israeli and Palestinian flags, with officers ultimately cutting out the Palestinian emblem before releasing him, local media has confirmed. The confrontation unfolded on Monday in Modi’in, a centrally located Israeli city, according to an account shared publicly by the detainee, Alex Sinclair, a lecturer at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Sinclair detailed the encounter in a public Facebook post, noting that he was quietly working from a local neighborhood cafe when an agitated ultra-Orthodox man approached him, yelling that his head covering violated Israeli law. Sinclair explained that he had worn the dual-flag kippah for nearly 20 years as a deliberate expression of his beliefs, and tried to de-escalate the situation by inviting the man to discuss the issue. The man refused to engage, however, and threatened to call law enforcement to the scene.

To Sinclair’s shock, officers arrived at the cafe just five minutes later. The two responding officers immediately informed him that the kippah was illegal and that they intended to seize it, he recalled. The pair frisked Sinclair before transporting him to a local police station, where he was held in a holding cell for approximately 20 minutes. When he was taken into custody, Sinclair said, he was told he could leave without his kippah, and when he demanded the return of his personal property, an officer handed it back with the Palestinian flag portion cut cleanly out of the fabric.

“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” Sinclair wrote, alongside public before-and-after photos of the damaged kippah. The lecturer said the encounter left him “shaken, angry and depressed,” warning that the incident is a clear symptom of a broader erosion of basic civil rights across the country under the current Israeli administration. “It’s hard not to say that this is the kind of thing that fascist regimes do,” he said. “It’s hard not to feel worried and anxious and frankly devastated that this is the direction that Israel is moving in.”

The incident comes amid a years-long tightening of restrictions on public displays of the Palestinian flag pushed forward by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which took office in late 2022. The campaign to restrict the flag is spearheaded by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who issued a formal order to Israeli police in January 2023 mandating that all Palestinian flags be removed from public spaces across the country.

Just last month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that police had arrested an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent for displaying the Palestinian flag inside of her own private home. Her family later told reporters that officers forced her to step on the Palestinian flag and hold an Israeli flag for photographs.

For Sinclair, the attack on his kippah demonstrates that Ben Gvir’s crackdown has escalated far beyond public policy, now encroaching on individual religious identity. “Ben Gvir’s unlawful crackdown has escalated to the point where the Palestinian flag was being banned from my head — my kippah, my religious identity itself,” he said.

Israeli police confirmed that a complaint over the incident has been filed with the Police Internal Investigations Department, but declined to provide any additional comment on the encounter when contacted by reporters.

Opposition political figures and civil rights organizations have uniformly condemned the incident, with some calling for a full criminal investigation into the officers’ conduct. Gilad Kariv, a Knesset member from the opposition Israeli Democrats party, highlighted the hypocrisy of the incident in a post on X. “If police officers were to cut off a Jewish man’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would be an outrage here,” Kariv wrote. He added that the encounter “points to a profound institutional failure within the Israeli police,” arguing that some officers have “completely lost their professional ethos, their commitment to serving the public, and their loyalty to the law.” Kariv called for the officers involved to face a criminal probe and civil legal action over their actions.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of the country’s leading independent human rights groups, joined the call for a full investigation. “Once again, the Israel Police is acting in line with the minister’s agenda and contrary to the law,” the organization said in a formal statement referencing Ben Gvir. “This is sheer madness and absurdity, and a serious violation of autonomy, freedom of expression, liberty, freedom of religion, and dignity. There is no legal ban on displaying the Palestinian flag or its various forms in the public sphere.”

On April 24, 2026, China’s official source confirmed that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has conducted planned military exercises in the maritime area east of Luzon Island, the Philippines. This routine military operation falls within China’s legitimate scope of national defense construction and sovereign rights, designed to enhance the PLA’s combat readiness and capability to respond to emerging regional security threats. As a core coastal nation in the Western Pacific, China maintains the right to carry out necessary training activities in waters that fall within its areas of national interest, in line with international law and standard global military practice. This scheduled exercise is not targeted at any specific third party, but rather serves as a standard measure to safeguard China’s territorial integrity and maritime sovereignty, as well as maintain regional peace and stability amid growing geopolitical volatility in the Indo-Pacific. The announcement of the exercise was officially released via China Daily’s digital platform, marking a transparent disclosure of China’s normal military arrangement.

In a significant escalation of its campaign to choke off Iran’s primary oil export revenue, the Trump administration announced sweeping new economic sanctions Friday targeting a top Chinese independent oil refinery and around 40 shipping firms and tankers linked to the transport of Iranian crude. The move, first revealed by The Associated Press, follows through on longstanding White House threats to impose secondary sanctions on any entities and nations that continue commercial activity with Iran, marking a sharp escalation of tensions across multiple diplomatic fronts.

Concurrent with the latest sanctions package, the U.S. has also enacted a physical blockade of the Strait of Hormuz this month, the critical Persian Gulf chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil consumption passes, amplifying already severe disruptions to global energy markets.

The timing of the announcement places new strain on bilateral relations just weeks before a scheduled in-person meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in China, a summit that was already expected to address a host of contentious trade and geopolitical disagreements between the two global powers.

At the center of Friday’s sanctions is Hengli Petrochemical’s large-scale refinery complex in the northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian. The facility boasts a daily crude processing capacity of approximately 400,000 barrels, earning its status as one of the largest independent refineries in all of China. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Hengli has accepted multiple shipments of Iranian crude since 2023, activities that the agency says have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Iran’s military establishment. Advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran first identified Hengli as one of dozens of regular Chinese buyers of Iranian crude in a February 2025 report.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reaffirmed the administration’s hardline stance in comments released Friday, stating that the department “will continue to constrict the network of vessels, intermediaries and buyers Iran relies on to move its oil to global markets.” The push to cut off Iranian oil trade has accelerated in recent weeks: earlier this month, Bessent’s department issued a formal letter to financial institutions across China, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, warning that the U.S. would impose secondary sanctions on any institutions facilitating Iranian trade, accusing these jurisdictions of allowing illicit Iranian financial activities to operate through their banking systems.

Speaking at a White House press briefing on April 15, Bessent underscored the gravity of the administration’s new policy, noting “we have told countries that if you are buying Iranian oil, that if Iranian money is sitting in your banks, we are now willing to apply secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure.”

The sanctions come amid a period of extreme turmoil for the global energy trade, where ongoing conflict around the Persian Gulf has already disrupted oil and natural gas shipments, driving international energy prices sharply higher. To partially mitigate the economic impact of rising fuel costs, the Treasury Department has issued temporary sanctions waivers for Russian crude imports and a one-time exemption for Iranian cargoes already at sea ahead of the new sanctions.

As of Friday, the Associated Press reported that it was still working to secure official comment from Chinese government representatives on the latest sanctions announcement. However, Beijing has already issued a formal rebuke of similar measures taken earlier this month against another Chinese refinery tied to Iranian oil purchases. Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said at the time that the unilateral U.S. sanctions “undermines international trade order and rules, disrupts normal economic and trade exchanges, and infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and individuals.”

A confidential internal email from the US Department of Defense, obtained exclusively by Reuters, has laid out a slate of potential punitive measures Washington could deploy against NATO member states that refuse to back the US-led campaign against Iran, including the extraordinary step of expelling Spain from the 75-year-old transatlantic alliance.

The leaked document comes amid long-running tension stoked by former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly blasted what he frames as an unfair power dynamic within NATO, where the US carries a disproportionate share of collective defense costs while many allies fail to align with Washington’s key foreign policy priorities. Trump has openly vented his frustration at widespread European pushback against the US-Israeli military campaign in Iran, and previously threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance entirely — a step not referenced in the internal Pentagon planning document.

Spain has emerged as the most outspoken European critic of the conflict, labeling the operation illegal from its launch and barring US forces from accessing Spanish military bases or national airspace for Iran war operations. In the Pentagon’s internal assessment, these actions were framed as a fundamental violation of the baseline expectations for alliance members contributing to collective efforts. On Friday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pushed back firmly against the reports of potential expulsion during a press briefing on the sidelines of an EU summit in Nicosia. “Spain is a reliable member within NATO that is fulfilling all its obligations,” Sánchez told reporters, adding “As a result, I am absolutely not worried” about any threats of expulsion.

The United Kingdom, another key NATO ally, has also drawn Trump’s anger for its limited opposition to the Iran war. While London allowed US aircraft to operate from British military bases, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has not aligned fully with Washington’s campaign. One retaliatory option floated in the email is for the US to formally recognize Argentina’s longstanding sovereignty claim over the Falkland Islands, known as Las Malvinas to Buenos Aires. The South Atlantic territory has been a point of contention between the UK and Argentina for decades, and a 1982 Argentine invasion sparked a 10-week war that killed nearly 1,000 servicemembers from both sides before the UK retook control of the islands. Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei, a close ideological and political ally of Trump, has repeatedly reaffirmed his country’s claim to the territory.

Other punitive options outlined include blocking NATO members deemed “difficult” by Washington from securing prominent leadership positions within the alliance’s institutional structure. As of publication, the UK Foreign Office had not responded to multiple requests for comment from Middle East Eye on the leaked plans.

When approached by Reuters for comment on the internal email, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson did not deny the document’s authenticity. “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us,” Wilson said in a statement. “The War Department will ensure that the President has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect.”

The British Foreign Office has shut down a specialized unit tasked with tracking potential violations of international law by Israeli forces in Gaza, a move that has sparked sharp criticism from human rights groups amid contradictory government messaging about its commitment to upholding global legal standards.

The closure comes just weeks after new Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper positioned respect for international law as a core pillar of the Labour government’s foreign policy agenda during her landmark annual address in early April. The decision to disband the unit stems from department-wide budget cuts that will terminate funding for the Conflict and Security Monitoring Project, an initiative run in partnership with the independent non-profit Centre for Information Resilience (CIR).

CIR has operated the world’s largest open-source monitoring initiative tracking violent incidents across Israel, occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon. The Guardian first reported Thursday that senior Foreign Office officials have been privately warned that ending the project will cut the department off from a unique, fully verified database documenting more than 26,000 separate incidents across the Middle East, including many alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

In an official statement released Friday, a Foreign Office spokesperson pushed back against criticism, saying the government continues to devote significant resources and expertise to conflict prevention and resolution efforts, including ongoing monitoring of international humanitarian law in Gaza. The spokesperson framed the change as part of a routine internal restructuring, noting that work previously handled by the dedicated monitoring unit has been transferred to an existing internal team within the department. The spokesperson also confirmed that the Foreign Office retains full access to all CIR research funded by UK tax dollars, and added that CIR’s findings are just one of multiple sources used to inform the government’s policy assessments on international humanitarian law issues.

To date, CIR has published more than 20 independent investigations based on its monitoring work, including high-profile probes into the shooting of Palestinian children by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The unit’s shutdown follows the new Labour government’s controversial decision earlier this year to cut the UK’s official overseas aid budget to 0.3% of gross national income, down from the longstanding 0.7% target enshrined in law. The internal review that led to the closure was ordered by Oliver Robbins, the Foreign Office’s recently ousted permanent secretary. Robbins was dismissed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week amid fallout from the Peter Mandelson lobbying scandal, adding another layer of political controversy to the monitoring unit’s closure.

Human rights organizations have condemned the move as a clear departure from the government’s stated commitment to upholding international law. Yasmine Ahmed, UK director at Human Rights Watch, said the closure raises serious questions about whether the Labour government is meeting its legal obligations under the UK’s arms export criteria, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the UN Genocide Convention. Katie Fallon, advocacy manager at the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, argued that the shutdown is designed to protect government ministers and officials who have deliberately distorted data on alleged international humanitarian law violations to cover up serious crimes against vulnerable populations in Gaza, all to maintain ongoing UK arms sales to Israel at any cost.

The UK has maintained extensive military cooperation with Israel throughout the ongoing conflict in Gaza, most notably through the sharing of intelligence gathered from surveillance flights operating over the enclave with the Israeli military. The two countries first signed a classified bilateral defence partnership agreement in 2020, which aimed to formalize and deepen security and military cooperation between the two states. The full text of the agreement has never been released to the public: former Conservative defence minister James Heappey noted in 2021 that the deal would streamline planning for joint UK-Israeli military activity, while sitting Labour defence minister Luke Pollard confirmed in 2024 that the text remains classified at the highest level. The UK Ministry of Defence also confirmed last October that the agreement is still in full force, according to reporting from independent outlet Declassified UK.

This reporting comes from Middle East Eye, a publication that produces independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions.