Britain has been urged to launch a diplomatic campaign to speed up the establishment of a Gaza security force in support of Donald Trump's peace plan.
A senior Labour MP and chairwoman of the UK Parliament's foreign affairs committee has said the deployment to Gaza of a force to disarm Hamas would advance the US President's peace plan in a substantive way.
Emily Thornberry told The National changes on the ground would allow a political process to be kick-started in the region. She pointed out the effect of structured disarmament in the framework that brought peace to Northern Ireland in the 1990s.
While Mr Trump’s 20-point peace plan had been “somewhat incoherent and incomplete”, with phase one of hostage-prisoner exchanges and the partial Israeli withdrawal only recently completed, she said it was “important for other countries to build on that” by using their diplomacy to fulfil other parts of the plan.
Phase two is supposed to feature the reconstruction and full demilitarisation of Gaza, including the disarmament of Hamas and other Palestinian groups.
Ms Thornberry, who has led the influential foreign affairs watchdog committee since 2024, said the International Stabilisation Force established under the UN Security Council was vital.
It was not correct to describe the deployment as peacekeeping, she said, but because “it was now clear that they're supposed to be taking the arms off Hamas ... those countries who said they were prepared to send their people to do peacekeeping are less keen”.
Indonesia has reportedly started preparations to send 8,000 soldiers to Gaza, as the first country to step up for phase two of the ceasefire.
With almost 600 Palestinians killed since the truce was established in October, “it's difficult really to call it a ceasefire”, she said.
Ms Thornberry also said half of Gaza being under Israeli control was a major problem.
British experience of de-escalating a long-running conflict through the Northern Ireland peace process has provided a model for resolving other conflicts. The Irish Republican Army was eventually fully disarmed in 2005 seven years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
Ms Thornberry said: “What we need to do is have a political process, there needs to be a path towards proper peace and, as we learnt in Northern Ireland, as part of a peace process people give up their arms.”
Gaza waits
With the Gaza Board of Peace set to hold its first meeting next week, focused on reconstruction, former Middle East envoy and British prime minister Tony Blair is expected to take part as an executive member.
“Tony Blair has had a deep interest in the region for a very long time and has many contacts,” said Ms Thornberry, an MP of more than 20 years. “If he can use those as a force for good, for the people of Palestine, good on him.”
Worry over Iran’s weakness
Ms Thornberry, who was Labour’s shadow foreign secretary for four years, warned that while talks with Iran were continuing, there is a lingering fear that the US could attack while negotiating, as it did in June last year.
She also expressed fears the scale of the Iran’s retaliation to any attack would be huge, especially if the regime felt it had nothing left to lose. “My concern is that there is really very little trust on either side and so there's a lot of work to do to get them to agree anything,” she said.
This has been underlined by Washington's deployment of USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group in the region, alongside squadrons of fighter-bombers.
She said the Iranians “had a point” that trust had been broken by the US bombing of nuclear bases during negotiations and that Washington “wants a lot from Iran”. This included ending the funding of proxies, and stopping the nuclear and missile programmes in exchange for the US lifting sanctions.
Speaking at her office in the House of Commons, the veteran Labour MP raised her concerns about how a weakened Tehran might respond should the talks fail.
“The Iranian regime has never been as weak as it is now," she said. “The worry is if what a country would do if it is weak and desperate."
Hinting that Iran could retaliate to a US attack in a far fiercer way than last summer, she said: "That worries me and it definitely worries the countries in the region as to what the Iranians might do.”
Unchecked retaliation
It appears now that the talks in Oman are at an impasse and Mr Trump is understood to have been passed a number of military strike options by his military commanders.
Marc Sievers, a former US diplomat who was ambassador to Oman, told The National there had been “a lot of use of fake news by the White House to confuse everybody about what they're doing”.
Asked about the possibility of unchecked Iranian retaliation, he said Tehran certainly had the capacity with missiles but also “sleeper cells that may be scattered about”.
That could lead to a “pretty messy and certainly a very unpredictable situation”, said Mr Sievers, who is the new director of AJC Abu Dhabi: The Sidney Lerner Centre for Arab-Jewish Understanding.
