UK settlement sanctions timing was driven by domestic politics, Israeli official tells ToI

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced plans to sanction West Bank settlements last month despite having scheduled a call with Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar for the following day in which they were to continue discussing the issue, an Israeli official tells The Times of Israel, corroborating a Telegraph report that Israel viewed the decision as “predetermined.”

Seconding the accounts of Israeli diplomatic sources in the report, the official alleges that Miliband pressed ahead with the sanctions package while private discussions with Sa’ar were ongoing, mainly to bolster the governing Labour Party’s standing on the Israeli-Palestinian issue ahead of its annual conference next month and a closely watched parliamentary by-election in which the far-left Green party hopes to score a victory.

The official confirms that on August 11, Sa’ar reassured Miliband that Israel would not begin construction on the E1 settlement project before Israeli elections in late October, and the two agreed to speak again on August 20. But on August 19, Miliband publicly stated that he planned to press ahead with sanctions, citing Israel’s publication of tenders for E1.

Responding to the sanctions package when it was formally announced last week, Sa’ar argued that the tenders’ publication was “not a new decision,” since E1’s formal approval was finalized in 2025 and the process had been underway for months.

A British Foreign Office spokesperson denies the Telegraph report, telling the newspaper that the Israeli claims are “completely false” and that the sanctions package came in response to the “moral emergency” of Israel’s expansion of settlements and rising settler violence in the West Bank.

The United Kingdom’s move received heavy support from Western nations, which have also condemned Israeli policies in the West Bank, with France and Canada committing to restricting settlement imports, while Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden stated they would support or consider taking similar measures.