Keir ‘ceasefire’ call after party split over Gaza

SIR Keir Starmer yesterday insisted the fighting in Gaza ‘must stop now’ as his position appeared to shift ahead of a Commons vote on an immediate ceasefire.

The Labour leader is coming under pressure as a key vote in the House of Commons this week threatens to re-open divisions within his party.

It comes amid splits between the party’s UK and Scottish leadership about whether to back an SNP motion demanding an ‘immediate’ ceasefire. Sir Keir has previously refused to back such a call and Labour is yet to reveal whether it will tell MPs to vote for or abstain on Wednesday’s motion. The Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said he supports the SNP motion and urged all MPs to demand an end to the violence ‘right now’ – but Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said any ceasefire must be ‘sustainable’.

Sir Keir said Rafah cannot become ‘a new theatre of war’ and any ceasefire must be respected by both sides and lead to a genuine peace process.

In his keynote address to the Scottish Labour conference yesterday, Sir Keir said he wanted Israeli hostages to be returned, an end to the killing of innocent Palestinians and ‘an end to the fighting’.

He added: ‘Not just now, not just for a pause, but permanently: a ceasefire that lasts. That is what must happen now. The fighting must stop now. Any ceasefire cannot be one-sided. It must stop all acts of violence, on both sides, and it must lead to a genuine peace process.

‘Because the offensive threatened on Rafah – a place where 1.5 million people are now cramped together in unimaginable conditions with nowhere else for them to go – this cannot become a new theatre of war. That offensive cannot happen.

‘And even in this most terrible of circumstances, the two-state solution must be back on the table.

‘A safe and secure Israel, where the horror that Hamas inflicted on October 7, the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, can never happen again. And alongside that, a viable Palestinian state, a state which is not in the gift of any neighbour, but is an inalienable right of the Palestinian people, and is recognised by this party and the world.’

But Mr Lammy then refused to commit to Labour MPs backing the SNP motion, telling the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: ‘We want the ceasefire to be permanent.’

‘Genuine peace process’