标签： Asia

On Monday, China launched a coordinated, targeted retaliation against the United States, responding to Washington’s recent escalation of unilateral sanctions by rolling out two major restrictive measures targeting American defense and industrial entities. The actions come just weeks after a seemingly productive bilateral summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, where the two sides had announced agreements on increased Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural goods and aircraft, highlighting how quickly diplomatic goodwill has evaporated amid escalating trade and tech tensions.\n\nFirst, China’s Ministry of Finance announced an immediate ban on all government procurement entities purchasing products from 46 U.S. defense contractors, led by industry giants Lockheed Martin Corporation and Raytheon Missiles & Defense. In a calibrated move to limit unintended spillover, the ban explicitly exempts U.S.-funded enterprises that operate production and commercial activities within China’s borders, leaving most U.S. commercial firms operating in the Chinese market unaffected.\n\nSimultaneously, China’s Ministry of Commerce added 10 U.S. entities to its official export control list under the country’s Export Control Law, barring all Chinese exporters from supplying dual-use technologies and materials to the blacklisted firms. The roster of restricted entities includes two of the United States’ most high-profile rare earth development firms, MP Materials Corp and USA Rare Earth, as well as leading U.S. drone and defense electronics manufacturers Red Cat Holdings, Teal Drones, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.\n\nA Commerce Ministry spokesperson clarified that the measures are a direct response to the U.S.’s recent expansion of its so-called Chinese military-industrial entity list, and are intended to safeguard China’s core national security interests and uphold international non-proliferation commitments. The context for the retaliation traces back to June 8, when the U.S. Pentagon carried out the largest expansion in the history of its blacklist of alleged Chinese military-linked companies, growing the roster from 134 to 188 entities. The update controversially included top Chinese civilian technology giants Alibaba, BYD, and Baidu, drawing outrage in Beijing for expanding the crackdown far beyond the defense sector to target China’s leading commercial technology firms. All three Chinese firms have rejected the U.S. designations as entirely baseless.\n\nLi Yong, an executive council member of the China Society for WTO Studies, framed the retaliation as a necessary check on Washington’s pattern of abusing unilateral sanctions and entity lists to suppress Chinese firms. “If such U.S. malpractices are left uncurbed, they will only escalate further,” Li told the Global Times in an interview Monday. He emphasized that China’s restrictions are narrowly tailored, targeting only items directly tied to military supply and manufacturing chains, a stark contrast to the U.S. approach of arbitrarily broadening its crackdown scope by fabricating false military connections for civilian firms with no military ties, as a pretense to hinder China’s high-tech sector development. Li added that the U.S.’s move to target leading Chinese firms across multiple sectors exposes its true goal: hindering the growth of China’s technology industry under a false veneer of national security concerns.\n\nChinese policy analysts note that Beijing designed the two retaliatory measures to maximize pressure on targeted U.S. sectors while avoiding broad damage to general foreign commercial activity in China. One Henan-based commentator writing under the pen name Sanding Sugar explained that the 10 blacklisted U.S. firms cover critical segments of the U.S. defense innovation ecosystem, from small drone manufacturing and aerospace payload supply chains to army tactical vehicle platforms and underwater surveillance systems. All of these sectors rely heavily on critical minerals that China dominates globally, including high-performance permanent magnets, high-purity indium coatings, and specialty ceramics — supply chains that cannot be reoriented or replaced overnight.\n\nOf particular note, the blacklisting of MP Materials and USA Rare Earth deals a major blow to Washington’s years-long effort to rebuild a domestic rare earth supply chain independent of China. “Blacklisting them does not stop them from mining raw rare earth ore, but it cuts off their access to China’s processed rare earth materials, separation products, and magnet precursors,” Sanding Sugar explained. “America’s plan to revive its domestic rare earth sector just hit a major compliance wall.”\n\nOn the Finance Ministry’s procurement ban covering 46 U.S. defense firms, analysts note the measure carries two clear signals. All 46 firms have been added to mandatory screening systems across every provincial finance department and central budget unit, turning the prohibition into an automatic check for all government purchase approvals. At the same time, the explicit exemption for U.S.-funded enterprises operating inside China means that U.S. commercial firms such as Apple’s component suppliers or U.S. medical equipment manufacturers operating in the Chinese market remain fully eligible for procurement, avoiding broad disruption to ordinary commercial activity.\n\nHunan-based political commentator Xi Kunlun argued that Beijing’s approach intentionally splits U.S. commercial and industrial interests, rewarding firms that maintain active, legitimate commercial operations in China while punishing those tied to the U.S. defense and competing rare earth sectors. “This retaliation carries a deeper message than simple payback. China is telling Washington that suppressing Chinese companies comes at a tangible price,” Xi said. “The U.S. targeted China’s drone industry, so China put American drone makers on its Entity List. The U.S. labels Chinese technology companies as military firms, so China blacklisted the equivalent American firms.”\n\nXi added that China is also leveraging its largest leverage: its massive domestic government procurement market, cutting off the access that allowed targeted U.S. firms to profit from Chinese public spending. “If Washington wants to talk, come with respect. If it wants to fight, China will oblige,” he summarized China’s position.\n\nStill, some independent observers have noted that the latest measures are more symbolic than a step toward full economic and technological decoupling between the two powers. They point out that most of the 10 blacklisted U.S. firms have very limited demand for Chinese-sourced raw materials and equipment, and Chinese government agencies had already largely halted purchases of U.S. defense products years before the ban. Some analysts also warn that Beijing must be cautious that retaliatory measures do not unintentionally deter the foreign direct investment that China continues to need for economic growth.\n\nRecent official data underscores this concern: China’s Commerce Ministry reported that inbound foreign direct investment fell 8.6% year-on-year in the first five months of the year, reaching 327.29 billion yuan, or approximately US$45.3 billion. While the ministry did not release a country-by-country breakdown, it confirmed that investment from Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Switzerland, and the United States actually increased over the period, suggesting that inflows from most European and other Asian economies have declined.\n\nOne Shanxi-based commentator noted that some Chinese firms, including consumer electronics giant Xiaomi and semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc, have already successfully petitioned to be removed from the Pentagon’s blacklist through legal challenges. Still, he acknowledged the structural imbalance in the current standoff: “To be honest about the shortcomings, Washington still sets the tone on military and security affairs globally, and can pull its European and allied partners into lockstep. It is unrealistic for China to fully decouple with the West. Western markets cannot be replaced quickly, emerging markets cannot yet fill China’s export order gap, and many overseas trading partners will quietly avoid blacklisted Chinese firms rather than risk falling foul of U.S. rules.”’

Fresh diplomatic progress between the United States and Iran has cleared the way for a temporary rollback of US sanctions on Tehran’s energy sector, even as the two sides remain publicly divided over the terms of nuclear inspection commitments reached during high-level talks in Switzerland.

US Vice President JD Vance characterized Monday’s discussions — the first high-level meeting under a pre-existing 60-day ceasefire and negotiation framework between Washington and Tehran — as having yielded “good progress.” Hours after the talks concluded, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that the US would issue a 60-day general license temporarily suspending sanctions on Iranian oil production and exports through August 21. All transactions completed during this window are required to be settled in US dollars.
Bessent outlined the agreement’s terms in a post on X, noting that the sanction rollback is tied to Iran’s pledges to maintain unobstructed navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and grant entry to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). For Iran, which saw its oil output and exports plummet after the US imposed a full energy blockade amid rising hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz, the temporary relief is expected to deliver significant economic breathing room: prior to the blockade, Iran produced roughly 4.6 million barrels of crude per day and exported 1.5 million barrels daily.

But Iran has quickly pushed back on the US’s framing of the deal. In a report carried by state-run news agency IRNA, foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei stated that Iran never entered negotiations on its nuclear program during the talks, and that “no new commitments” related to IAEA inspections have been adopted. Any future engagement with the nuclear watchdog, Baghaei added, will proceed “under existing procedures set by Parliament and the Supreme National Security Council” — a position reaffirmed by the Iranian government, which stressed that any new inspection arrangements would require formal approval from both governing bodies before taking effect.

US President Donald Trump pushed back on Iran’s denial hours later via his Truth Social platform, writing that “Everybody is fully aware that Iran will agree to have Major Weapons Inspections in order to ensure ‘Nuclear Honesty’ long into the future.”

Monday’s meeting marked the conclusion of the first High-Level Committee gathering under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a bilateral agreement between the US and Iran that paused active hostilities for 60 days to create space for technical negotiations. Pakistan and Qatar are serving as mediators for the talks, with Vance leading the US delegation and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf heading Iran’s negotiating team. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government brokered the original MOU, hailed Monday’s session as a success, confirming that the two sides have agreed to a roadmap to reach a final comprehensive agreement within the 60-day negotiation window.

The opening round of talks has already spurred a wave of follow-up diplomatic activity across the Middle East. The US confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to Bahrain next week to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit, a trip first reported by Middle East Eye on June 10. Rubio will also make official stops in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait. The trip will mark the first visit by a senior US official to the Gulf since the US and Israel carried out joint strikes against Iran on February 28.

Gulf nations have been deeply divided over the recent conflict between Washington and Tehran. Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait suffered the most significant harm during the hostilities, with the UAE adopting the hardest-line stance against Iran — a position that included carrying out its own strikes against Iranian targets, according to Trump. Bahrain, which hosts the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Manama, saw both its military infrastructure and key commercial assets damaged: the Financial Times reported that Amazon’s regional cloud computing operations based in Bahrain were targeted in an attack early in the conflict.

By contrast, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia pursued more moderate, balanced positions during the war. All three publicly condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf targets, but Saudi Arabia has long pushed for diplomatic negotiations between the US and Iran to de-escalate tensions. The Trump administration, however, has openly expressed frustration with Oman, which has declined to publicly reject Iran’s longstanding position that it has the right to charge transit fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump even publicly threatened to bomb Oman if it joined any regional framework to enforce such tolls. Oman shares territorial claims to the strategic waterway with Iran, making its position uniquely sensitive.

In the wake of Monday’s talks, Iran’s chief negotiator Ghalibaf announced via his official Telegram channel that he will travel to Oman for bilateral talks, alongside Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, to discuss cooperation on consolidating joint management of the Strait of Hormuz. Separately, Pakistan confirmed that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will travel to Islamabad on Tuesday for further discussions on the ongoing negotiation process.

Newly unsealed court documents obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization ProPublica have pulled back the curtain on previously undisclosed pre-IPO foreign investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, bringing long-simmering U.S. national security concerns about foreign access to sensitive aerospace technology into sharp relief. The records, which emerged from a corporate legal dispute in Delaware after a court battle that ended in the Delaware Supreme Court ruling in favor of ProPublica’s request for public access, detail how a U.S.-based intermediary firm named Tomales Bay Capital connected more than a dozen investors based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Russia to early SpaceX share purchases between 2018 and 2021, at a time when the rocket company remained privately held. SpaceX, which builds a substantial portion of its core business around classified U.S. government contracts including spy satellite development for the Pentagon, has long faced scrutiny over how it manages foreign investment, given Washington’s longstanding concerns that Beijing seeks to acquire cutting-edge U.S. aerospace technology for military and espionage purposes. Strikingly, the records reveal that one of the most high-profile investors linked to these pre-IPO deals is an entity controlled by David Su, co-founder of leading Beijing-based venture capital firm MPCi. Su’s entity invested $15 million into a SpaceX-focused fund managed by Tomales Bay in 2020, court records show. This is not Su’s only connection to the global space industry: MPCi has been a prominent backer of multiple Chinese aerospace companies that compete directly with SpaceX, and two of those satellite firms have been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government. One of the sanctioned firms was penalized for allegedly supporting Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, and hit with a second round of sanctions just last month for accusations that it assists Iran in targeting U.S. military forces. MPCi also maintains formal partnerships with Chinese state-backed investment initiatives: in 2025, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology listed the firm as a partner in a national government program to advance China’s domestic aerospace sector. Beyond the Chinese-linked investments, the records also confirm that an investment entity tied to Qatar’s royal family acquired an early stake in SpaceX, adding another layer of complexity to the rocket maker’s roster of foreign backers. Investment values in the early SpaceX stakes ranged from just $800,000 to a high of $40 million, making the total foreign holdings in the company extremely small as a percentage of overall equity. Even so, the revelations come as SpaceX wrapped up the largest initial public offering in U.S. history last week, a listing that catapulted Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire, and that saw the company explicitly bar investors from China and Hong Kong from participating in the IPO due to cited “regulatory and compliance risks,” according to prior reporting from Bloomberg. That decision to block Chinese and Hong Kong investors in the public offering underscores the company’s awareness of the sensitivity of foreign ownership, and aligns with longstanding U.S. government allegations that China uses outbound investment into sensitive American technology sectors to acquire proprietary information and support military modernization efforts. No evidence of improper activity by Su or any of the named investors has emerged from the released records. But foreign policy and national security experts warn that the connections raise legitimate red flags for U.S. national security. Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor and former State Department official who specializes in foreign investment scrutiny, noted that the core outstanding question is whether any China-based investors gained access to nonpublic information about SpaceX’s proprietary technology or strategic planning. “If an investor has conflicts of interests with other companies in China – if they could feed that information to competitors – it could be a national security concern,” Danzman explained. All parties connected to the early investments have pushed back against any implication of wrongdoing. In an official statement, MPCi noted that Su “has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX,” adding that Su is a Singapore citizen residing in Singapore and that he only manages U.S. dollar-focused funds for the firm. That said, a 2024 public profile of Su notes that he has spent nearly 100% of his time working in mainland China over the past two decades. Ryan Stonerock, a lawyer representing Tomales Bay Capital, also emphasized in a statement that his client “has not provided any non-public, sensitive information regarding SpaceX to investors.” Stonerock explained that all investors in the firm’s SpaceX funds are passive limited partners, and that the only information they receive is standard quarterly fund valuation updates, with no additional access to SpaceX internal data. The lawyer also pushed back on characterizations that most of the investors with listed addresses in China or Russia are aligned with adversarial foreign governments, noting that “the vast majority, if not all, of the investors included on the unsealed Tomales Bay investor list are not citizens of any foreign adversary, including Russia or China, and certainly none of them are agents of Russia or China, or any other foreign adversary.” He added that many investors with listed mailing addresses in those countries do not actually reside there, and are instead citizens and residents of the U.S. or other allied nations. SpaceX itself has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the newly revealed records, and one of the sanctioned Chinese space companies named in the documents has previously denied allegations that it supported the Wagner Group. Beyond Su and the Chinese-linked investors, the records reveal a range of other notable names on the Tomales Bay investor roster, including former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi, and a British Virgin Islands entity linked to Indonesian billionaires. The records also highlight connections to Russian interests: a $10 million 2020 investment by a shell Delaware company called HAL9001 Partners Fund I was signed by venture capitalist Roman Sobachevskiy, who co-owned a separate company that was recently fined hundreds of millions of dollars by the U.S. Treasury Department for managing investments on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy has not been personally accused of any wrongdoing in connection with the SpaceX investment, and a Tomales Bay spokesperson confirmed that the Russian oligarch “had no involvement with the investment.” Sobachevskiy has not responded to requests for comment on who provided the capital for the SpaceX stake. On the Qatari side, the records show that funds affiliated with Bracket Capital, an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London, and Doha, invested roughly $48 million in SpaceX stock across multiple transactions between 2017 and 2020. An email from Tomales Bay founder Iqbaljit Kahlon to SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen confirms that Bracket Capital manages capital on behalf of the Qatari royal family. The records also list a $10 million 2020 investment from AM FIG Cayman Limited, an entity with a listed address in Doha. It remains unclear whether the Bracket investments were made directly on behalf of the royal family or another client, and Bracket Capital has not responded to requests for comment. Kahlon, who has longstanding close ties to SpaceX leadership – with Johnsen testifying that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have” during Johnsen’s 15-year tenure at the firm – built a lucrative business brokering pre-IPO SpaceX shares for outside investors. His model involved Tomales Bay purchasing SpaceX stock directly, packaging the shares into investment funds, and selling limited partnership stakes in those funds to outside investors for fees. In a 2021 pitch meeting with a potential Chinese investor, meeting minutes later entered into court records show Kahlon promised special access to SpaceX leadership, including quarterly business updates, on-site visits to SpaceX facilities, and opportunities to hold direct interviews with the company’s CFO. Prior reporting had already confirmed the existence of Chinese pre-IPO investors in SpaceX, but most individual identities have been closely guarded for years. The unsealed Tomales Bay investor list adds hundreds of new names to the public record of SpaceX ownership, offering the most detailed snapshot to date of the company’s pre-IPO shareholder base. While the early stakes held by foreign investors represented tiny fractions of SpaceX’s total equity, they have already generated massive windfalls: SpaceX’s valuation surged from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion following last week’s IPO, turning even small early investments into substantial returns. A 2025 ProPublica report also previously revealed that SpaceX explicitly allowed Chinese investors to acquire pre-IPO stakes as long as investment capital was routed through offshore secrecy jurisdictions including the Cayman Islands, a practice laid out in court testimony from the Delaware corporate dispute. Musk also maintains extensive separate business interests in China, where his electric vehicle firm Tesla operates multiple large manufacturing facilities that produce the majority of the company’s global output.

For weeks, Andy Burnham, the incoming UK prime minister set to take office as early as next month, has intentionally avoided public discussion of foreign policy. Multiple anonymous Labour party sources confirm that Burnham and his campaign team judged that weighing in on international issues would do little to boost his chances in the Makerfield by-election, a predominantly white working-class constituency he ultimately won to secure his seat in parliament.

During one of the few recent occasions he was pressed on the conflict in Gaza, Burnham refused to publicly label Israeli actions in the territory as genocide. “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester,” he stated at the time, though he added that he held deep concerns over the “disproportionate nature of what has happened in terms of the destruction” and called for a full international investigation and accountability for all parties.

The conflict has already claimed a devastating human toll since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel. Data confirms that Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and wounded an additional 170,000 people to date.

Now that Burnham has secured his parliamentary seat and is on track to become prime minister unopposed in what is widely described as a political coronation, long-simmering pressure over his foreign policy stance is set to intensify. To win over the bulk of Labour’s membership, which overwhelmingly backs tougher critical action against Israel, and to win back disillusioned left-wing voters who have abandoned the party in droves over the issue, Burnham will be forced to confront the topic head-on.

Recent electoral data underscores just how costly the party’s current vague stance on Gaza has been. Polling from last month’s local elections shows that Labour lost more former voters to the left-wing Green Party than to the right-wing Reform UK. A subsequent study found that more than half of former Labour voters who plan to support another centre-left or left-wing party in the next general election cited Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a key factor in their decision to abandon the party.

Labour MP Kim Johnson has urged Burnham to demonstrate the moral clarity that current leader Keir Starmer has repeatedly failed to show on the Gaza crisis. “If Andy wants to win back traditional Labour voters, especially those who feel abandoned on foreign policy, he has to show the moral clarity [Starmer] has too often lacked on Gaza,” Johnson told Middle East Eye. She added that Burnham must be willing to state openly what Starmer would not: that a genocide is ongoing in Gaza, and the party’s refusal to speak honestly and act decisively on the issue has come at a severe political cost.

“People wanted Labour to call it what it is, to stand up for international law and to listen to the Palestine solidarity movement,” Johnson explained. “Instead, that silence has alienated core voters and driven support away from the party. Take the May local elections for example – Palestine was on the ballot for millions of progressive voters. We lost 58 percent of the seats we were defending in England and lost almost four times as many voters to the Greens than to Reform UK. We cannot deny that Gaza is a major reason many have walked.”
Johnson emphasized that foreign policy is not a peripheral issue, saying: “Foreign policy isn’t a side issue. It’s about values, credibility and whose side you are on when it matters.”

Burnham’s history on Middle East policy is nuanced, leaving room for questions about what stance he will ultimately take. In 2015, he joined Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel party grouping, a move that positioned him as a non-radical alternative to strongly pro-Palestinian figures like then-party leader Jeremy Corbyn. During his unsuccessful 2015 Labour leadership bid, Burnham even stated that his first overseas trip as prime minister would be to Israel.

But records also show Burnham has long been willing to criticize the Israeli government. Within days of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Israeli prime minister in 2015, Burnham wrote on X that the news was “depressing,” noting that Netanyahu had run on a pledge to expand illegal Israeli settlements and adding that “Palestine will need more international support.” That same year, he told the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that he backed full recognition of Palestinian statehood, calling it “not a gift to be given but a right to be recognised,” and acknowledged that Israeli settlements and their ongoing expansion remain a core barrier to lasting peace.

Burnham also has longstanding ties to the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), a leading UK policy group focused on the Middle East. He joined Caabu on a 2012 trip to the occupied West Bank, and in March 2025 praised the organization as a critical parliamentary partner, saying “in these times that we live now, Caabu is needed more than ever.”

Caabu director Chris Doyle argues that the next UK prime minister must implement a dramatic shift in the country’s Middle East policy. A meaningful course correction, Doyle says, would require ending the current climate of impunity Israel enjoys, holding parties that violate international law accountable through tangible consequences including backing International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli officials, and guaranteeing full unimpeded access for UN and other humanitarian aid agencies to Gaza.

Doyle added that the UK must embrace a more humble role in global conflicts: “We need to accept that we are a middle-ranking power, that we don’t have the ability to go and determine conflicts abroad. But where we can make a difference is through creative, imaginative, determined diplomacy rooted in international law, rooted in basic core principles of how to resolve conflicts.”

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent siege and bombardment of Gaza, Burnham broke with Starmer’s Labour leadership to join London mayor Sadiq Khan and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar in calling for an immediate permanent ceasefire. In a column for The Independent, he warned Starmer against branding MPs who disagreed with the party line on the issue “as disloyal or as if they don’t care about innocent lives.”

Just last month, Labour party delegates voted overwhelmingly at the annual conference to officially recognize that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and to back sanctions on Israel, a shock rebuke of the party’s current stance that underscores how deep support for a tougher line is among grassroots members.

Caabu and the British Palestine Project have already outlined five core Palestine policy pledges they are demanding the next Labour prime minister adopt: ban all UK trade with goods and services produced in illegal Israeli settlements, uphold and enforce international law, guarantee unrestricted access for UN agencies and humanitarian organizations to Gaza, open occupied Palestinian territories to independent journalists, politicians and international investigators, and work with global allies to end all unlawful regional occupations.

Doyle also notes that the next prime minister will need to resist intense pressure from the incoming second Trump administration to maintain the UK’s current uncritical support for Israel, rather than caving to unilateral American demands. Calls for a full ban on settlement goods are already growing among Labour backbenchers, and internal polling shows 87 percent of rank-and-file Labour members support such a ban, with just 6 percent opposing it. Privately, senior Foreign Office ministers have already acknowledged that a ban on settlement goods would align fully with the UK’s official stated position on the occupied Palestinian territories, sources confirm.

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, laid out clear expectations for whoever takes office at Downing Street: “Whoever walks into Downing Street next must do what Starmer would not to end these horrors: stop providing arms to Israel, stop trading with illegal settlements in the West Bank, guarantee unrestricted humanitarian access, and ensure that those responsible for crimes against humanity are held fully accountable. Respect for international law is measured by actions, not rhetoric. The next prime minister must not be an ally to atrocities.”

Keir Starmer’s sudden resignation as British prime minister, delivered less than two full years after he secured a historic landslide general election victory, has brought a abrupt end to a premiership undone largely by his inconsistent and deeply unpopular approach to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The collapse of Labour’s public support has benefited rising right-wing party Reform UK and left-wing rivals the Green Party, with new polling confirming more Labour voters defected to the Greens than to Reform in last month’s local elections.

A recent survey of former Labour supporters who plan to back another centre-left or left-wing party in the next general election found that more than half cited UK collaboration with what they frame as Israel’s genocide in Gaza as the primary reason for abandoning Starmer’s party. These findings underscore how the Gaza conflict, and Starmer’s response to it, has come to define his toxic political legacy.

Critics across the UK left have condemned Starmer’s tenure as a betrayal of core progressive values. His predecessor as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told Middle East Eye that Starmer “swapped political principles for corporate donors – and leaves behind a legacy of broken pledges, grotesque inequality and complicity in genocide. If that isn’t moral bankruptcy, then what is?” Green Party leader Zack Polanski offered an equally scathing assessment, listing “shit in our rivers, pensioners jailed for protesting, migrants thrown under the bus, supporting a genocide” as Starmer’s core contributions to public life.

To understand the roots of Starmer’s political downfall over Gaza, it is necessary to trace his shifting positions from his time in opposition through his premiership. The conflict began on 7 October 2023, when a Hamas attack killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel. In the months that followed, Israeli military operations in Gaza killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians, wounded more than 170,000, and left thousands more missing and presumed dead beneath the rubble of destroyed infrastructure.

Immediately after the 7 October attacks, while still leading the Labour opposition, Starmer aligned firmly with the then-Conservative government’s pro-Israel stance. In an 11 October 2023 interview with LBC, when asked whether Israel’s siege of Gaza – involving cuts to power and water access for the entire enclave – was appropriate, Starmer replied: “I think that Israel does have that right, it is an ongoing situation, obviously everything should be done within international law but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has the right to defend herself.” He refused to condemn the collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population for days, only issuing a partial retraction of his comments on 20 October.

That same November, Starmer ordered all Labour Members of Parliament to reject a Scottish National Party (SNP) parliamentary motion calling for an immediate end to the collective punishment of Palestinians. Weeks later, after an Israeli strike on a Gaza refugee camp killed more than 50 civilians alongside a Hamas commander, Starmer’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy argued that “it’s clear to me that it’s wrong to bomb a refugee camp but clearly if there is a military objective it can be legally justifiable.”

In early 2024, Starmer was accused of undermining parliamentary procedure to block a ceasefire motion: reports emerged that he had lobbied House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle to break with longstanding convention and allow a watered-down Labour motion to be debated ahead of a stronger SNP ceasefire proposal, effectively killing the latter. The move triggered widespread procedural chaos, with SNP and Conservative MPs walking out of the chamber in protest before Labour’s watered-down amendment passed.

It was not until later in 2024 that Labour began to draw modest distinctions between its position and that of the outgoing Conservative government. Lammy called on the Conservative administration to publish legal advice it had received on arms sales to Israel, accusing the then-foreign secretary of avoiding democratic scrutiny. In May 2024, Labour broke with the Tories to back the International Criminal Court after its chief prosecutor announced applications for arrest warrants for senior Israeli ministers.

Once in office, Starmer maintained Britain’s deep military and intelligence cooperation with Israel throughout the campaign in Gaza. Under his premiership, the Royal Air Force conducted at least 518 surveillance flights over Gaza, with British officials claiming the flights were “solely to locate hostages” despite the operation being shrouded in official secrecy. British intelligence collected from these flights was shared directly with Israeli forces, including footage captured on days when Israeli strikes killed British citizens in Gaza.

One high-profile case that exposed the secrecy around this cooperation was the April 2024 Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen aid convoy that killed seven aid workers, including former British Royal Marine James Henderson. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) held RAF surveillance footage of the strike site from the day of Henderson’s death, but repeatedly refused to release the footage under Freedom of Information requests, citing national security and defence exemptions.

Starmer’s government also enshrined legal protections for roughly 2,000 British-Israeli dual nationals who served in the Israeli military during the Gaza campaign, formally recognising “the right of British dual nationals” to serve in Israeli operations.

While Starmer never fully broke with the UK’s longstanding pro-Israel posture, his government did adopt some limited policy shifts that put it at odds with the Israeli leadership. Most notably, Starmer’s administration ended Britain’s longstanding objection to the ICC’s jurisdiction over territories occupied by Israel, and imposed sanctions on far-right Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. In June 2026, it became the first British government to formally announce “that there should be no economic involvement in illegal Israeli settlements” in the occupied West Bank, and joined France, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Australia in imposing new sanctions on networks that fund and enable violent settler attacks against Palestinians. Even so, Starmer resisted widespread calls from his own backbenchers to implement a full ban on imports of goods produced in illegal settlements.

The most contentious domestic and international debate surrounding Starmer’s Gaza policy centered on UK arms sales to Israel. In September 2024, shortly after taking office, Starmer’s Labour government suspended roughly 30 direct arms export licenses to Israel after an official assessment concluded there was a “clear risk” UK-made weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. This included a suspension of licenses for direct exports of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel. Critically, however, components sent to a global F-35 spare parts pool – which can still be diverted to Israeli aircraft – were exempted from the ban.

UK-made components make up 15 percent of every F-35, one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world, which Israel deployed extensively across its Gaza campaign as well as strikes in Lebanon and Iran. The Starmer government argued that a full halt to all F-35 component exports would disrupt the entire global F-35 fleet and threaten international security, justifying the partial ban.

Even with the partial suspension, Starmer’s government approved $169 million in new military exports to Israel in just three months – more than the total value of arms approvals granted by the Conservative government between 2020 and 2023. Lammy, who served as foreign secretary under Starmer, told parliament that most of the exports were “defensive in nature” such as helmets and goggles, and “not what we describe routinely as arms.” Official records show the shipments included 8,630 separate munitions exports classified as “bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and other similar munitions.”

Starmer faced the most damaging internal criticism in March 2025, when a close ally and former cabinet member accused him of deliberately suppressing evidence of Israeli war crimes. Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the News Agents podcast that he had shared a dossier of war crime evidence collected by British doctors who had worked in Gaza, only for Starmer to accuse him of leaking the document for political gain. Streeting explained: “I had met British doctors, I had been distressed by what they told me, I had seen serious and substantial allegations of war crimes being committed and I felt this country had a moral and legal responsibility to respond.” Starmer has consistently refused to publicly describe Israeli actions in Gaza as war crimes, and previously walked back comments by Lammy that Israeli operations amounted to a “breach of international law.”

Throughout his premiership, Starmer’s Gaza policy was marked by growing contradictions. In July 2025, his government announced it would formally recognise a Palestinian state, but infuriated left-wing Labour MPs by tying recognition to a series of preconditions related to Israeli security demands. It ultimately extended recognition in September 2025, triggering a furious diplomatic backlash from the Israeli government.

These contradictions extended to other areas of foreign policy as well. After aligning closely with United States foreign policy during his time in opposition, Starmer clashed with US President Donald Trump earlier this year even as he continued to cooperate with US military operations against Iran. Starmer initially announced Britain would not participate in February 2026 US strikes on Iran, and told the US it could not use British military bases for the attacks. He quickly reversed course, however, allowing the US to launch strikes on Iranian missile sites from British bases – a move legal experts described as a violation of international law. Starmer then campaigned in last month’s local elections on the claim that he had kept Britain out of the war with Iran.

At home, Starmer’s government drew accusations of authoritarianism for its crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy. In July 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper designated direct action group Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organisation, making any public expression of support for the group a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The High Court initially ruled the proscription was “unlawful” and “discriminatory” following a legal challenge by group co-founder Huda Ammori, but the Court of Appeal overturned that ruling last week after a government appeal. Since the ban was first introduced, thousands of people across the UK have been arrested on terrorism charges for holding pro-Palestine Action signs at silent vigils.

Last month, high-profile American progressive political commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker were barred from entering the United Kingdom, a move widely attributed to their public criticism of Israel. By contrast, senior Israeli military and political figures have remained welcome in the UK under Starmer: in November 2024, Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi made a secret visit to London to meet UK Attorney General Richard Hermer, and the government granted him special diplomatic immunity for the trip. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar visited in April 2025 to meet Lammy, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog held a formal meeting with Starmer in London that September.

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, summed up the widespread criticism of Starmer’s legacy on Monday, saying: “Starmer’s ‘international record will forever be marred by half measures and inaction in the face of Israel’s atrocities. Under Starmer’s leadership, the UK continued to provide arms to Israel while its forces bombed Gaza’s hospitals into rubble and deliberately starved an entire population of the food and medicines they needed to survive.”

Ultimately, Starmer’s inconsistent approach to Gaza left him unpopular with virtually all segments of the British electorate. He imposed a partial arms embargo but rejected a full ban, shared British intelligence with Israel while calling for an end to the war, and left office facing accusations from his own former cabinet of covering up evidence of war crimes. It remains to be seen whether the next British prime minister will shift course on UK policy toward Israel and Gaza.

This article is produced by Middle East Eye, an independent outlet providing unrivaled reporting and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and global issues connected to the region.

High-stakes peace negotiations hosted in Switzerland have achieved “major progress” toward regional de-escalation, Iran’s top diplomat announced late Sunday, even as belligerent threats from former U.S. President Donald Trump and ongoing Israeli military assaults in Lebanon have created severe risks of derailing the talks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi highlighted that tireless mediation efforts from Pakistan and Qatar have delivered key breakthroughs aligned with the recently signed memorandum of understanding (MOU), including binding commitments to launch a specialized deconfliction cell tasked with overseeing the full termination of Israeli military operations across Lebanon.

Beyond the Lebanese ceasefire framework, Araghchi confirmed that negotiators have reached consensus on three additional critical points: an end to the long-running U.S. economic blockade on Iran, the unfreezing of a portion of Iran’s overseas sovereign assets, and the adoption of a major national reconstruction and development plan tailored for Iran.

The Iranian delegation departed the Swiss negotiating venue shortly after Trump issued extreme threats that included vows to assassinate Iranian diplomatic personnel and forcibly “take over” the sovereign state of Iran. These threats directly violate core terms of the existing MOU, which mandates all participating parties to refrain from any threat or use of military force against one another.

In a joint official statement released Sunday evening, the governments of Pakistan and Qatar, the two lead mediating nations, confirmed that negotiators have finalized a 60-day roadmap to reach a binding final peace agreement. The framework clears the way for immediate technical talks to begin, laying the groundwork for sustained progress.

“In addition, a direct communication line between the relevant parties has been established to prevent unintended incidents and miscommunication, with the core goal of guaranteeing safe passage for commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,” the joint statement added. “The mediating parties will continue to exert every possible effort to maintain a constructive negotiating environment and advance toward a comprehensive final agreement.”

The optimistic outlook from Araghchi and the mediator governments comes after the first round of formal talks got off to a rocky start. The Iranian delegation initially delayed its arrival to Switzerland in response to a deadly wave of Israeli airstrikes that targeted southern Lebanon late last week.

Notably, Israeli leadership is not a participating party to the Swiss negotiations, and it has repeatedly refused to end its military occupation of southern Lebanon — a key sticking block that remains a major obstacle to a final deal ending the broader conflict that the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran in late February. Iran has repeatedly stated that the Trump administration must pressure Israeli authorities to end their offensive in Lebanon as a core condition for any final agreement.

Over the weekend, as talks unfolded in Switzerland, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed his government’s hardline stance in a social media post. “Israel has no intention of withdrawing from the Beaufort, which is an integral part of the security zone in Lebanon and essential for the defense of the Galilee settlements and IDF forces,” Katz wrote. He added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and he have repeatedly made clear that Israel will not withdraw from its occupied security zone in Lebanon, leaving a key unresolved hurdle for the ongoing negotiation process.

When Keir Starmer first launched his bid for the UK Labour Party leadership, his core pitch to party voters was straightforward: retain the bulk of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing policy platform, but package it in the polished, establishment-friendly image of a suited, buttoned-up professional. Long before Labour’s crushing 2019 general election defeat at the hands of Boris Johnson that forced Corbyn out of the leadership, Starmer’s inner campaign circle had already identified him as the perfect candidate to pull off this rebranding.

Backed by a bloc of Labour right-wing figures including Morgan McSweeney, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, Starmer secured the leadership after making 10 explicit left-wing pledges to the Labour members who voted him into office. Within months, every single one of those commitments had been either fully abandoned or quietly watered down. For his entire tenure, first as opposition leader and later as prime minister, Starmer clung to that carefully crafted image of competent, managerial professionalism, while systematically discarding the policies he had promised to carry over from Corbyn — the man he once publicly called a friend. To the party’s left-wing members, who he publicly disparaged as antisemites, he sent a clear message: “The door is open, and you can leave.”

But according to multiple insiders — serving and former civil servants, Starmer’s former legal colleagues, and senior Labour Party sources who spoke on condition of anonymity to Middle East Eye — the now-resigned Starmer, who leaves office as the most unpopular British prime minister in decades, also failed to deliver on his core promise of being a competent, results-focused grown-up in office. This failure, they say, rippled through every area of his governance, most glaringly in the UK’s approach to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, where long-held international legal norms were cast aside.

People who have interacted with Starmer in personal settings — including regular football teammates near his north London home in Kentish Town — describe him as a man defined almost entirely by raw ambition and ruthless competitiveness. He hates losing, they say, but once he climbed to the highest office in the UK, he had no clear plan for what to do with power. In less than two years, he lost it entirely.

“He was rubbish on all metrics, apart from the fact that he isn’t a liar or a cheat – but really that should be an entry requirement,” one senior civil servant who worked closely with both Starmer and his former chief of staff McSweeney told MEE. “Height, voice, inspiration, achieving anything: he was rubbish on all fronts.”

That same official noted that McSweeney, the veteran Labour strategist widely credited with engineering Starmer’s rise to power and a close ally of Peter Mandelson, had no clear roadmap for governing once he controlled the levers of power. “He was a campaigner,” a second civil servant explained of McSweeney. “And he just stayed in that mode once he was in government. He didn’t look to get things done.”

Labour MP Clive Lewis framed the core failure of Starmer’s leadership in three clear terms. “Leadership at this moment needs three things: vision, a clear sense of where we are taking the country and why,” Lewis told MEE. “It needs empathy, a real grasp of how people are living and what they are up against. And it needs a plan equal to the scale of what we face. Keir had none of these.”

Lewis added: “Even so he would not be the first PM to be guilty of such failings. But these are not normal times. Facing us is the spectre of the far right and such failings become catastrophic as opposed to just electorally problematic. That could not be allowed. Hence his early departure.”

McSweeney’s pro-Starmer group Labour Together, which raised more than £700,000 in undisclosed donations — a portion of which came from prominent pro-Israel business figures such as Trevor Chinn — successfully seized back control of the Labour Party for the right wing, with Starmer serving as its public face. A source who has known McSweeney since his childhood in County Cork, Ireland, told MEE that McSweeney’s political project was driven first and foremost by a visceral hatred of Corbyn and the Labour left, a conflict that dates back to his early days as a grassroots organiser across London.

While McSweeney is often publicly described as economically left-of-centre but socially conservative, the source called him an unapologetic neoliberal. “He joined the Labour Party because he knew he had a chance of doing well there… The contempt he and his wife [Imogen Walker, who became a Labour MP in 2024] have for Corbyn, is visceral,” the source said.

That contempt was front and centre even in Starmer’s final resignation speech. The outgoing prime minister claimed he had inherited a Labour Party “that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt” and that he had rooted out “the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesperson hit back with a scathing rebuke: “Keir Starmer ends as he started: with lies. Corbyn turned Labour into the largest party in Europe, built and funded by half a million people who believed in social justice and peace. Starmer swapped political principles for corporate donors – and leaves behind a legacy of broken pledges, grotesque inequality and complicity in genocide. If that isn’t moral bankruptcy, then what is?”

On the same day of Starmer’s resignation, Corbyn announced he would formally reintroduce his private member’s bill calling for an independent public inquiry into the British government’s complicity in Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Madeleine Rees, a prominent British human rights lawyer who worked closely with Starmer in the 1990s, pointed to his stance on Gaza as his defining moral and political failure. “He capitulated on things he really shouldn’t have. The biggest of these was Gaza,” Rees said. Another former legal colleague from Starmer’s days as a liberal barrister at Doughty Street Chambers noted that very few of his former professional associates would still publicly defend his record as prime minister.

“I didn’t think his reign would be so short. It shows how important principle and optimism are,” Rees told MEE. “He capitulated on things he really shouldn’t have. The biggest of these was Gaza. Abetting a genocide. He could have taken a legal stand and called it a crime. I feel sorry for him because he is a decent man, despite all this, and this will be super hard for him,” she added.

Beyond Gaza, foreign policy observers also painted a picture of directionless, unprincipled governance. Asked about Starmer’s approach to key global regions, an Indian foreign policy adviser and analyst who participated in UK-India Free Trade Agreement negotiations told MEE: “Have you an inkling of what UK policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, southeast Asia, Hong Kong and India is? I have no clue what the UK stands for anymore.”

The adviser argued that the negotiated UK-India FTA would only “make rich UK wallahs richer. What is the UK but land around the City of London?” He added: “Starmer’s foreign policy was foreign to the UK’s interests. The development aid is gone. The BBC has no support from them. British universities in India are all shops, with no research and development angle.”

Andy Burnham, the popular Labour mayor of Greater Manchester commonly known as the “King of the North,” is now widely expected to replace Starmer as party leader and prime minister. But one left-wing Labour activist warned that Burnham could simply be “Starmer 2.0.”

Josh Simons, who replaced McSweeney as head of Labour Together before winning election as the MP for Makerfield in 2024, recently vacated his seat to clear the path for Burnham’s leadership bid and was a prominent fixture in the by-election campaign. Wes Streeting, the favoured candidate of Labour’s right wing who resigned as health secretary last month, has already thrown his support behind Burnham; if Burnham wins and keeps Streeting in a top cabinet role, Labour’s left wing faces an uphill battle to retain any influence in the new administration.

John McDonnell, who served as shadow chancellor under Corbyn, has called on the party to return to its historic “broad church” model. That model, he said, is one “in which the views of the full range of traditions, left, right and centre, are respected and engaged with.” Asked whether that inclusive model is likely to be re-established after Starmer’s departure, McDonnell told MEE: “We’ll see, but if the broad church is not re-established, any administration will fail.”