On Monday, as Israelis were busy burying their dead, the British foreign secretary David Lammy announced that his country is suspending 30 of 350 licenses for the export of arms to Israel, in order to prevent possible violations of international humanitarian law. It’s worth noting that, according to the UK’s own offficial assessments, the IDF hasn’t broken any such laws. Melanie Phillips comments:

The defense secretary, John Healey, said the UK remained “a staunch ally of Israel” but that the British government had a “duty to the rule of law.” But Israel isn’t breaking any law. Nor does the British government say it is. It says merely there’s a “serious risk” that it might.

But there’s no evidence to back that either. It’s an entirely tendentious assertion by the Foreign Office, which has drawn overwhelmingly on malicious falsehoods produced by the Hamas-linked UN and NGOs that lie reflexively about Israel as part of a global strategy to bring about its destruction.

The impact on Israel’s military capabilities will indeed be minimal. Israel buys relatively few weapons from Britain, which buys far more weapons from Israel. Given the incalculable benefits Britain also derives from Israeli intelligence and military expertise—the very expertise the British government has now besmirched by recycling Hamas-derived lies and distortions—Britain has far more to lose than Israel from a cooling of this relationship.

The arms embargo is but the latest in a series of deeply hostile moves against Israel by the new Labor government.

For instance: as Phillips details, another government minister recently bragged about getting preferential treatment at an emergency room because a doctor recognized her and remembered her anti-Israel positions.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.