The boss of one of the UK’s biggest banks says it is being attacked “all the time” by online criminals and he is kept up at night by cyber threats.

“It does keep me awake,” HSBC UK chief executive Ian Stuart told the Treasury Committee of MPs.

“Because we can be attacked and we are being attacked all the time.”

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Mr Stuart said banks were spending “enormous” sums of hundreds of millions of pounds on IT systems – the biggest expense in their businesses.

“Cybersecurity is now very much at the top of our agenda,” he added.

Concerns were also highlighted by Lloyds Bank chief executive Charlie Nunn, who said financial fraud will get worse if banks cannot intervene to prevent it and social media and telecoms companies are not incentivised to halt it.

Mr Nunn said the UK “has become the home of fraud”, adding that the number of victims is “pretty disturbing” and “individual cases are harrowing”.

Major high street businesses, including M&S and the Co-op, have been hit by cyber attacks in recent weeks and had their operations impacted.

Cybersecurity threats, however, were not behind the several-day outage at Barclays at the end of January, its UK chief executive Vim Maru said.

He added: “We’ve learned the lessons. We’re acting on the lessons, both work done internally, but also with help from third parties as well.

Account holders across the UK have suffered a spate of IT glitches from different banks around paydays this year.

Tens of millions of pounds on IT have been spent and customer glitches have fallen, Mr Maru said.

He added that the problem at Barclays was a software issue, saying: “We put a fix in place that means that we won’t have a recurrence.”

The foreign secretary has denounced Israel’s actions in Gaza as “intolerable” but stopped short of saying it had committed genocide.

MPs could be heard shouting “genocide” in the Commons chamber as David Lammy announced the government was suspending its trade negotiations with Israel and summoning Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, to the Foreign Office.

The UK has also sanctioned a number of individuals and groups in the West Bank which it says have been linked with acts of violence against Palestinians – including Daniella Weiss, a leading settler activist who was the subject of Louis Theroux’s recent documentary The Settlers.

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Israel immediately criticised the UK government actions as “regrettable” and said the free trade agreement talks, which ministers have now backed out of, were “not being advanced at all by the UK government”.

Oren Marmorstein, a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, said: “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”

Mr Lammy’s intervention came in response to Israel ramping up its latest military offensive in Gaza and its decision to limit the amount of aid into the enclave.

Tom Fletcher, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of “deliberately and unashamedly” imposing inhumane conditions on Palestinians by blocking aid from entering Gaza more than 10 weeks ago.

He also told the UN’s security council last week that it must “act now” to “prevent genocide” – a claim that Israel has vehemently denied.

Speaking in the Commons, the foreign secretary said the threat of starvation was “hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians” and that the 11-week blockade stopping humanitarian aid reaching Gaza was “indefensible and cruel”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to allow a limited amount of aid into the besieged enclave in response to global concern at reports of famine.

Mr Lammy said Mr Netanyahu’s govenrment was “isolating Israel from its friends and partners around the world, undermining the interests of the Israeli people and damaging the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”.

“We are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict,” Mr Lammy added.

“Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need.”

Referring to one of the far-right ministers in Mr Netanyahu’s government, he said Bezalel Smotrich “even spoke of Israeli forces cleansing Gaza, destroying what’s left of residents, Palestinians being relocated, he said, to third countries”.

MPs from across the house shouted “genocide” as Mr Lammy said: “We must call this what it is. It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”

In the Commons, a number of Labour MPs urged the government to go further against Israel.

Yasmin Qureshi, the Labour MP for Bolton South and Walkden, said there needed to be a “full arms embargo” and said: “Can I ask the foreign secretary what additional steps he’s going to be taking in order to stave off this genocide?”

Another Labour MP told Sky News that while the statement was “better than previously…without a concrete timeline and a sanctioning of responsible ministers, it’s hard to know what tangible difference it will make.”

Read more:
British surgeon in Gaza says it is now ‘a slaughterhouse’
Gaza at mercy of what comes next – analysis
How Israel has escalated Gaza bombing campaign

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Israeli officials have said its plans to seize all of Gaza and hold it indefinitely. – which would move the civilian population southward – will help it achieve its aim of defeating Hamas.

Israel also believes the offensive will prevent Hamas from looting and distributing humanitarian aid, which it says strengthens the group’s rule in Gaza.

Mr Netanyahu has defended Israel’s actions in Gaza and reacted angrily to a joint statement penned by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada, in which they urged Israel to end its military offensive in Gaza and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid allowed into the enclave.

The Israeli prime minister said: “By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottawa and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities.

“No nation can be expected to accept anything less and Israel certainly won’t. This is a war of civilisation over barbarism. Israel will continue to defend itself by just means until total victory is achieved.”

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