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A stunning political upheaval is unfolding in UK politics, with British Health Secretary Wes Streeting reportedly preparing to launch a leadership challenge against incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer — a move many senior MPs have already labeled an internal party coup.

According to senior party sources, Streeting held a brief 10-minute closed-door meeting with Starmer at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday morning, and is now on track to step down from the cabinet and officially trigger a contest for the Labour leadership this Thursday. For the Ilford North MP, who aligns with the Labour Party’s right wing, this leadership bid is a race against the clock: he aims to unseat Starmer before the party’s soft left wing can unify behind a rival contender, most notably Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who has long been floated as a potential candidate and could launch his own challenge if he secures a seat in parliament.

Crucially, Labour Together, the influential think tank that was instrumental in securing Starmer’s 2020 leadership victory, is widely understood to be backing Streeting. The group is eager to preserve its hold on power within a future Labour government should Starmer step down.

Regardless of which candidate ultimately prevails in a leadership contest, political analysts widely agree that a shift in British foreign policy is all but guaranteed — and few policy areas will see more change than the UK’s long-standing military and political alliance with Israel. The Israeli war in Gaza has been a deeply divisive flashpoint in British politics for more than two years, and the recent US-Israeli military campaign against Iran has already sent ripple effects through the British economy, driving up energy costs and stoking inflation. In the most recent local elections, the Green Party — the most prominent political voice opposing UK support for Israel — eroded Labour’s voter base far more severely than the right-wing Reform Party, underscoring how deeply the Israel issue has shifted voter loyalties on the left.

Any new prime minister replacing Starmer, whether through voluntary resignation or forced ousting, will be desperate to push back against the Green Party’s electoral gains and win back disillusioned left-wing voters. That political pressure almost certainly means a policy adjustment on Israel, but questions about what a Streeting-led government would actually do remain shrouded in contradiction. Middle East Eye’s deep dive into Streeting’s public and private record on Israel and the Middle East reveals a pattern of conflicting statements that have left even close political observers unsure of his true positions.

Streeting is a long-standing, active member of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel parliamentary lobby group. A senior Westminster source confirmed that Streeting meets regularly with LFI leadership in parliament. He has also received significant financial donations from Trevor Chinn, a 90-year-old former car industry magnate and philanthropist who was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour in November 2024 for his lifelong service to the State of Israel. Between 2021 and 2024, Chinn donated more than £15,000 (approximately $20,200) to Streeting, and gave an additional £5,000 in 2025 — after Streeting became Health Secretary — to “support campaigning in Ilford North”.

Chinn’s father served as president of the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization that has long provided funding for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are classified as illegal under international law. Public organizational records show that between 2015 and 2018, the UK JNF transferred more than £1 million to Hashomer Hachadash, a Zionist militia operating in the occupied West Bank. Chinn himself is a long-time supporter of both LFI and its Conservative counterpart, Conservative Friends of Israel, and two former officials from Tony Blair’s Labour government described him to Middle East Eye as a “very strong supporter of Israel” who was brought in as an unofficial advisor to Blair’s cabinet.

Despite these deep ties to pro-Israel lobbying, Streeting has a documented history of engaging with Palestinian stakeholders as well. In February 2016, he joined a trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank organized by Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, where he met with then-Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and sitting members of the Israeli Knesset, and visited a Palestinian community school in Khan al-Ahmar that was facing ongoing intimidation from Israeli settlers and military forces at the time. Later, he became the first member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet to visit Israel after Starmer won the Labour leadership, on a separate trip funded by LFI. He framed that visit as a four-day “fact-finding mission” during which he met with Israeli politicians, diplomats, academics and health experts, and later praised Israel’s medical innovation, saying “Israel is 10 years ahead of the NHS.”

After the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, when Starmer’s then-opposition Labour Party backed the Conservative government’s policy of supporting Israel’s siege and bombing campaign in Gaza, Streeting aligned fully with official party line. Speaking to Sky News on 25 October 2023, he repeated Israel’s widely circulated claim that Hamas “cowardly [uses] innocent civilians, children, women, men as human shields” and echoed the Israeli assertion that “Hamas uses buildings like schools and hospitals as bunkers.” He refused to back calls for a permanent ceasefire, instead calling only for a temporary “humanitarian pause,” arguing that “Israel is a democracy… I don’t know if Hamas will abide by the rules for a pause.” In January 2024, he dismissed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as a “distraction from what needs to happen, which is the diplomatic heavy lifting to bring about an end to this conflict.”

By mid-2024, however, Streeting began to ramp up public criticism of Israeli actions. “You look at the scale of the bloodshed, you look at the scale of destruction in Gaza, the number of civilian casualties,” he noted in one interview. “They are disproportionate, and it’s horrible.” In the 2024 UK general election, Streeting only narrowly held onto his Ilford North seat, where British Palestinian independent candidate Leanne Mohammed came within just 600 votes of unseating him — a result widely interpreted as a reflection of widespread voter anger in the diverse constituency over Labour’s pro-Israel policies. A senior Labour source familiar with Streeting’s thinking confirmed to Middle East Eye that as Health Secretary, Streeting privately pressured Starmer to toughen his public criticism of Israel.

Under Starmer’s premiership, UK-Israel diplomatic relations did cool gradually: the UK introduced a partial arms embargo on Israel in September 2024. Yet Starmer’s government continued widespread military cooperation with Israel throughout the Gaza campaign, most notably carrying out hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza and sharing real-time intelligence with Israeli forces. In March 2025, Starmer walked back previous comments from then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy that Israel was committing a “breach of international law.”

Streeting never publicly accused Israel of war crimes, but he continued to edge toward stronger criticism: in April 2025, he said Israeli attacks on Gaza were “intolerable” and “cannot be justified as self-defence.” By September that year, he went further, arguing that Israel’s actions in Gaza were “leading Israel to pariah status” and added that Israeli President Isaac Herzog “needs to answer the allegations of war crimes, of ethnic cleansing and of genocide that are being levelled at the government of Israel.”

That public shift, however, was thrown into new context in February 2026, when private text messages exchanged between Streeting and Peter Mandelson — former British ambassador to the U.S. and a controversial associate of the late Jeffrey Epstein — were leaked to the press. Multiple senior Labour sources told Middle East Eye that Streeting himself orchestrated the leak, in a bid to shore up left-wing support for his leadership bid and increase pressure on Starmer. One senior party official said Streeting was “intentionally presenting himself as more critical of Israel than official Labour policy” to appeal to disaffected voters.

The leaked texts revealed that Streeting privately acknowledged Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes” as early as July 2025, and explicitly endorsed imposing economic and political sanctions on Israel. He told Mandelson that the Israeli government “talks the language of ethnic cleansing, and I have met with our own medics out there who describe the most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children.” He noted that he had been a member of LFI for more than 20 years, adding: “I have never been a shrinking violet on Israel. [Israel is engaged in] rogue state behaviour. Let them pay the price as pariahs with sanctions applied to the state, not just a few ministers.”

While some left-wing critics welcomed Streeting’s private candor, the leak sparked fierce backlash from across the political spectrum. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn published an open letter to Streeting, accusing him of a “shameful failure” for remaining in Starmer’s cabinet even as he privately condemned Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Corbyn argued that “once a government acknowledges that Israel is committing war crimes, then any continued military or political support is an admission from the government that it is knowingly aiding and abetting those war crimes.” He pressed Streeting to answer a series of critical questions: why he did not resign from a government he believed was supporting war crimes, whether he believed the current Labour government was complicit in Israeli war crimes, whether he would cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into UK complicity, and what specific steps he had taken internally to end British military and political support for Israel. Corbyn noted that “our history books will shame government ministers who could have stopped the genocide in Gaza, but chose to stay silent instead,” and confirmed to Middle East Eye that Streeting has not responded to the letter.

In the run-up to 2026 local elections, Streeting also publicly attacked pro-Palestinian politicians challenging Labour in his own constituency, framing their criticism of Labour’s Israel policy as “sectarian politics.” In Redbridge, the east London borough that contains Streeting’s Ilford North seat, the Redbridge Independents — a local grouping backed by Corbyn’s Your Party — won nine council seats last week. In March, Middle East Eye reported that Streeting sent a campaign letter to constituents accusing Redbridge Independents of being “a divisive political party that aims to only represent some of us, more focused on foreign conflicts than on fixing potholes.” He doubled down in April, telling The Times that “We’re voting for Redbridge council, not the UN Security Council. Who you choose to run your local council matters and the Redbridge Independents represent a divisive brand of sectarian politics.”

Critics have pointed out the contradiction in this attack, noting that Starmer himself made foreign policy a central campaign issue during the same local elections, when he attacked Reform Party leader Nigel Farage and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch over their stances on the Iran war, arguing that “Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch would have jumped into this war with both feet without thinking through the consequences… Britain would have been “in a war without a plan” had they been in power, adding that he “won’t be dragged in” to the US-Israeli war. Senior Labour MP John McDonnell, a prominent left-wing critic of Labour’s Israel policy, criticized Streeting’s attack on the independents, telling Middle East Eye that “one interpretation verges on a Reform [style] dog whistle politics. The last thing we need is more divisive politics in these elections.”

Today, as Streeting prepares for what could be one of the most dramatic internal leadership challenges in modern British political history, his true positions on Israel and foreign policy remain an enigma to most observers. His public and private stances shift dramatically depending on his audience, shaped by his long ties to pro-Israel lobbying, his precarious hold on a marginal seat, and his ambition to become prime minister. If Streeting follows through on his plan to launch a leadership challenge, he will finally be forced to lay out a clear, consistent foreign policy agenda for the UK — and he will almost certainly craft that agenda with an eye toward holding his marginal seat and winning the next general election.

A newly disclosed classified US intelligence assessment from earlier this month directly contradicts public statements from senior Trump administration officials who have claimed to have “decimated” Iran’s military missile capabilities, according to a new report published Tuesday by The New York Times. The findings, shared with US policymakers, paint a far different picture of Iran’s current operational capacity than the White House has presented to the public. The assessment confirms that Iran has restored operational access to 30 out of 33 key missile sites positioned along the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical chokepoints for global energy trade. Through this narrow waterway, roughly one-fifth of the world’s total oil and liquefied natural gas supplies transit each day, meaning restored Iranian capabilities pose a renewed threat to international commercial shipping and US naval forces deployed in the region. Citing intelligence sources familiar with the document, The NYT reports that Iran can now deploy mobile missile launchers from many of these sites to reposition weapons across the country, and in some cases, can conduct direct missile launches from the existing launchpads at the restored facilities. Overall, Iran retains approximately 70 percent of its pre-war stockpile of missiles and 70 percent of its national fleet of mobile launchers, the assessment found. When it comes to Iran’s network of hardened underground missile storage and launch facilities, US military intelligence gathered via satellite imagery and other advanced surveillance methods indicates that Tehran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of these sites, which are now either partially or fully operational. These findings align with an earlier report from The Washington Post published last week, which cited separate US intelligence assessments showing Iran retained around 75 percent of its mobile launchers and 70 percent of its pre-war missile inventory. The gap between classified intelligence conclusions and the administration’s public rhetoric traces back to the strategic choices US military planners made when launching the joint US-Israeli offensive against Iran that began on February 28. According to The NYT’s reporting, when strikes targeted Iranian missile sites, US forces largely chose to seal off the entrances to underground facilities rather than completely destroying them from the inside out – a decision driven largely by critical shortages of heavy bunker-busting munitions. Military planners prioritized preserving existing stocks of these specialized weapons for potential high-intensity conflicts with North Korea and China, leading to a more restrained approach to destroying Iran’s hardened infrastructure. Additional reporting from The NYT has previously confirmed that the Iran offensive has already severely depleted US stockpiles of multiple key munitions types, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot interceptor missiles, MGM-140 Army Tactical Missiles, and Precision Strike missiles. To date, the US has fired roughly 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles in the campaign – a number equal to nearly the entire remaining stockpile the US held before the war began. It has also expended 1,300 Patriot interceptors, a volume that would take more than two years to replace at 2025 production rates. The Trump administration has pushed back hard against these reports, doubling down on its claims of a resounding victory in the campaign. A White House spokesperson rejected the NYT’s reporting, reiterating that Iran’s capabilities had been “crushed” and claiming that anyone who suggests Iran has reconstituted its missile forces is either “delusional or a mouthpiece” for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez also issued a sharp rebuke, calling the NYT’s reporting “disgraceful” and accusing the outlet of acting as a public relations arm for the Iranian regime. Valdez insisted that Operation Epic Fury, the official name for the US-led offensive, stands as a “historic accomplishment.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine also pushed back on claims of depleted munitions during a Tuesday appearance before a House appropriations subcommittee, telling lawmakers that the US currently “has sufficient munitions for what we’re tasked to do right now.” After the February 28 opening of the offensive, which began with a massive wave of joint US-Israeli airstrikes across Iran, Tehran responded with its own missile and drone strikes targeting Israel and allied Gulf Arab states, and temporarily closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic.

Chaos unfolded unexpectedly at the heart of the Philippine legislative branch on [relevant date] when multiple bursts of gunfire echoed through the Senate complex, triggering an immediate panic that sent working journalists scrambling for safety. Reporters who were on-site covering routine Senate business were caught off guard by the sudden sound of shots, with many abandoning recording equipment and rushing to secure shelter in locked offices and barricaded hallways as the complex went into lockdown. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, senior government and Senate officials have remained tight-lipped, releasing no official information confirming the identity of the person or persons who fired the weapons, the motive behind the incident, or whether any casualties have been reported. Local law enforcement units quickly deployed to the Senate grounds, establishing a security cordon around the building and launching an urgent investigation to piece together the details of what occurred. The incident has already sparked urgent questions about the state of security at high-level government facilities in the Philippines, as lawmakers and public figures call for a full review of access protocols and safety measures to prevent similar scares in the future. As of this update, the situation remains partially unresolved, with official updates still pending from relevant authorities.