There was an air of confidence about Labour as their annual party conference concluded earlier this month – heading into government and free from the turmoil and divisions that had overshadowed the Conservative Party conference.

However, when Labour leader Keir Starmer and his shadow Attorney General, Emily Thornberry, gave interviews on the Israel-Gaza conflict, that facade soon shattered.

In an interview with LBC on Wednesday last week, Keir Starmer was asked by host Nick Ferrari if a siege on Gaza was an appropriate response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel (as of now, more 1,400 Israelis have been killed and 199 taken hostage). Any siege would equate to “cutting off power and water”. Starmer replied: “I think that Israel does have that right.” He added that “obviously everything should be done within international law”, even though those actions would clearly breach it.

Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions (agreed internationally to regulate the conduct of war in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War) is pretty clear that no country has the right to mete out collective punishment – the targeting of civilians for offences they have not personally committed. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its commentary on the Geneva Conventions, says “sieges may only be directed exclusively against an enemy’s armed forces”, not civilian populations.

The backlash was immediate. Labour Party members have resigned in disgust, including former MPs, councillors and members of national committees. But many more, myself included, are expressing their contempt for a leadership that seems to have abandoned any serious commitment to universal human rights and international humanitarian law.

Perhaps most shocking, for its cold inhumanity, was Starmer’s interview on Sky News that same morning. When asked what sympathy he had for the citizens of Gaza (hundreds of whom had already been killed by Israeli airstrikes; the death toll now exceeds 2,700), Starmer replied: “What Hamas has done has done nothing for the Palestinians.”

Pressed again to show a modicum of humanity for the innocent men, women and children living under siege, Starmer said: “Nobody wants to see that situation, but we have to be clear where responsibility lies: with Hamas.”

The day before, journalists at the Labour Party conference were briefed by Labour sources that shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy would not be attending a Labour Friends of Palestine fringe meeting as advertised. I have heard second-hand via Labour MPs that Lammy was asked by the Labour leadership not to attend the meeting but stood firm and a compromise was reached.

Lammy struck an appropriately sober tone at the event, spelling out that the death toll among Palestinians this year – including 38 children – was the highest on record. “I think of the children of Gaza facing the reality of war,” he said, in contrast to his leader who could not seem to bring himself to acknowledge Palestinian lives.

This was compounded when Thornberry was interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight. As Attorney General in a prospective Labour government, Thornberry would provide legal advice to ensure that the Government acts within the law. She refused to say whether besieging a civilian population was in line with international law, offering only that actions must be “done in accordance within international law”.

One well-placed Labour source tells me that even within the Shadow Cabinet there were concerns raised about the line taken by Thornberry and Starmer. On Thursday, a newly modified line was tweeted by Lammy, which emphasised: “We must distinguish Hamas terrorists from the Palestinian people. There must be humanitarian access to Gaza, for food, water, medicines and electricity.”

That same day a new set of guidance was texted and WhatsApped to Labour frontbench MPs. It contained not a single condemnation of Israeli breaches of international humanitarian law, and made clear that Hamas was to blame for any pain in Gaza: “Palestinians are suffering terribly because of Hamas’s actions.”

There was a general injunction that “international law should be upheld”, even though it’s clear that this is not happening. In northern Gaza, hundreds, now thousands, of civilians are being killed and are under illegal siege – mealy-mouthed commitments to international law in the abstract are not sufficient.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, Starmer said: “Labour stands with Israel, Britain stands with Israel.” While he called for humanitarian access and corridors to be opened, there was no question of standing with the people facing siege and bombardment in Gaza or even for standing with the Palestinian people against Israel’s long-running occupation and blockade.

This is indicative of the double standards that pervade any discussion of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Just as the decades of brutal occupation, blockade, and daily harassment and subjugation do not justify the actions of Hamas, neither does the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas justify the subsequent war crimes of Israel.

On Friday, a note was sent to local Labour committees, telling them that their members could not discuss the Israel-Gaza conflict in their monthly meetings, with a diktat that “any such motions will be ruled out of order”. Even in the run-up to the Iraq War 20 years ago, Tony Blair did not ban local parties from discussing it and nor did he ban them from taking a position of outright opposition.

The note from Labour’s General Secretary David Evans also banned local Labour Party banners from Palestinian solidarity marches across the country. Labour MPs received a similar note from the party’s chief whip, banning them from attending any marches or demonstrations. This clampdown on legal free expression bodes ill for an incoming Labour government.

On Saturday, Keir Starmer issued another statement, which offered not a single word of empathy for grieving Palestinians. It made no demands of Israel not to commit war crimes. It emphasised that he had rightly met with representatives of the Jewish community in Britain as antisemitic attacks have increased, but despite an almost identical surge in Islamophobic attacks, Starmer did not mention any meetings with Muslim or Palestinian representatives.

The historian Mark Curtis coined the term “unpeople” in his 1995 book on British foreign policy, The Ambiguities of Power. Curtis explained that unpeople were “human beings who impede the pursuit of high policy and whose rights, often lives, therefore become irrelevant”.

To the Labour leadership, it seems, the Palestinians are unpeople. To the Labour membership, committed to universal human rights and international law, the people of Gaza matter just as much as the people of Israel. As war crimes are committed, and thousands killed, we must not be silenced.

Andrew Fisher is the former executive director of policy at the Labour Party

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