标签： Asia

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.”

In a provocative address that upends ongoing regional ceasefire efforts, far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir publicly ruled out any potential truce with Lebanon on Monday, doubling down on extreme rhetoric that frames the entire country as a legitimate military target for Israeli forces.

Speaking at the weekly faction meeting of his ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party held in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Ben Gvir issued a direct demand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: formally reject any negotiated peace agreement with Lebanon in upcoming talks with U.S. President Donald Trump. He argued that Washington would understand the hardline position, drawing a inflammatory comparison to how the United States would never accept hostile armed groups operating along its borders.

“You wouldn’t tolerate having Nazis on your border. You wouldn’t tolerate your soldiers being attacked and being limited in terms of the response. Our response must be 100 percent,” Ben Gvir stated. “I want to say thank you to the Americans, but our red line is harming soldiers and harming civilians.”

Going further, the minister issued an explicit threat to the Lebanese capital Beirut, warning it could suffer the same near-total destruction that the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun has endured amid Israel’s ongoing military campaign in the besieged Palestinian enclave. “The equation must be very simple and clear: the State of Israel must be safe. If Israel is not safe, Beirut will look like Beit Hanoun,” he said.

In subsequent comments carried on Israel’s Channel 14 and shared widely on social media by the Quds News Network, Ben Gvir doubled down on his radical stance, rejecting the distinction between targeting Hezbollah and launching attacks across the entirety of Lebanon. “Lebanon, all of Lebanon, should become our playground. All of Lebanon should be our target,” he declared, justifying the blanket targeting by noting that Hezbollah operatives hold positions within Lebanon’s national government.

The minister also reiterated dehumanizing comments he made over the weekend, arguing that no hardship for Lebanese civilians should stand in the way of Israeli military goals. “Not a single tear from an Israeli mother can be tolerated. Even if there are tears from a thousand Lebanese mothers, we need to keep going,” he said.

Ben Gvir’s hardline rejection of a ceasefire comes as escalating Israeli military activity across Lebanon creates major friction in international diplomacy. Spiking Israeli air strikes and expanding ground deployments in southern and eastern Lebanon have already derailed ongoing ceasefire talks between the United States and Iran, negotiations that were being brokered by third-party mediators including Pakistan and Qatar. The situation on the Lebanon frontier has emerged as a major point of disagreement between the Trump administration and the Israeli government, with Washington and other G7 nations repeatedly calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon—calls that have been consistently rejected by Israeli leadership.

For its part, Hezbollah has demanded the Lebanese government refuse any direct negotiations with Israel as long as Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory continue. Despite this, Lebanon’s national government has publicly expressed hope that a U.S.-Iran deal could bring an end to the ongoing hostilities that have devastated large swathes of the country.

According to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health, Israeli military strikes across Lebanon launched since March 2 have killed at least 3,798 people and wounded an additional 11,781, leaving a growing humanitarian crisis in the conflict zone.

In a sudden development that has shaken British politics, Keir Starmer has stepped down as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party less than two full years after securing a landslide victory in the UK general election. His announcement came Monday morning outside 10 Downing Street, ending days of swirling public speculation about his political future.

Starmer confirmed in his address that he would formally resign from the party’s top leadership role, and has requested the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee launch a leadership selection timetable that will open nominations on July 9, with the full process wrapped up before parliament’s summer recess. Under this schedule, a new party leader will be confirmed and installed before MPs return to Westminster in September, regardless of whether a contested election is held.

Addressing the pressure that led to his exit, Starmer acknowledged that the Parliamentary Labour Party had delivered a clear answer on whether he remained the best candidate to lead the party into the next general election. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “Every decision I’ve taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour party.” He added that he had already notified King Charles III of his decision during a conversation earlier that morning.

The collapse of Starmer’s leadership follows a string of damaging political setbacks. A catastrophic round of local election results, widely blamed on Starmer’s deep unpopularity among voters, preceded last week’s by-election win in Makerfield by Andy Burnham, the former popular mayor of Greater Manchester. That victory solidified Burnham’s position as the overwhelming favourite to replace Starmer, and political insiders now widely expect him to run unopposed, potentially taking office as prime minister as early as mid-July.

In his departure speech, Starmer defended his two years in office, framing his tenure as a period of necessary reset for the Labour Party. “I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” he said. “We changed our party, ripping out the poison of antisemitism and restoring trust on the economy, defence and national security.” He pledged full, unwavering support to his successor, adding: “They will inherit a Britain that is far stronger and fairer than the one I inherited two years ago, better prepared for the challenges ahead and better able to ensure the Labour Party secures a second term in office.”

Burnham is scheduled to take his seat in the House of Commons later on Monday, completing his transition from municipal leadership to national politics. While former Health Secretary Wes Streeting previously indicated he would enter the leadership race, sources close to Streeting have confirmed he is now reconsidering his bid. Polling data shows Streeting is even less popular among Labour Party members than the outgoing Starmer, making a successful challenge unlikely.

Politically, Burnham is positioned on the soft left of the Labour Party, and has long been described as a pragmatic “political chameleon” who has adjusted his policy stances significantly over his career. During his tenure as Greater Manchester mayor, he and his allies developed a policy framework they have branded “Manchesterism”, which he now proposes to roll out across the entire country.

Unlike Starmer’s more centrist economic approach, Manchesterism advocates for far more interventionist government action in the economy – stopping short of full socialism, but bolder than the outgoing government’s vision. In Burnham’s own framing, it is a “modern and functional response to the high-inequality, low-growth trap that came from the 1980s drive to privatise economic power and overcentralise political power in the Treasury”. He has already publicly pledged to bring water and energy utilities back into public ownership if he takes office.

Still, questions remain about which policy iteration of Burnham voters and party members will see as prime minister. During his recent by-election campaign, he indicated he would retain key elements of Starmer’s policy agenda, most notably continuing the government’s push to dramatically cut net immigration. This position is intended to win back voters who have defected to the right-wing Reform Party, but it has already become a potential target for criticism from the left-wing Green Party, which has seen a major surge in national polling in recent months.

Burnham and his campaign team are well aware of the political risk posed by the Green Party’s rise, and observers expect many of his upcoming economic policies will be crafted to appeal to left-leaning voters who have abandoned Labour for the Greens. If Burnham takes office as expected, the coming months could bring sweeping policy shifts across British politics.