Rishi Sunak to visit Israel on Thursday as part of trip to Middle East
Rishi Sunak will arrive in Israel on Thursday, commencing a two-day trip to the wider region amid growing concerns the conflict with Hamas could escalate.
The prime minister will hold a meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog on Thursday morning, before travelling to a number of other regional capitals in a diplomatic bid to prevent fighting from spiralling.
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Downing Street did not specify exactly where the prime minister would go after Israel, but said he would be meeting counterparts “from across the Middle East”.
In his meetings he will press for the route into Gaza to be open for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the exit of those trapped in the territory, while expressing his condolences for victims on both side of the war.
His departure came as President Biden said Egypt’s President Sisi had agreed to open the Rafah crossing to allow 20 trucks of aid into Gaza.
Ahead of the trip, Mr Sunak said: “Every civilian death is a tragedy. And too many lives have been lost following Hamas’s horrific act of terror.
“The attack on al Ahli hospital should be a watershed moment for leaders in the region and across the world to come together to avoid further dangerous escalation of conflict. I will ensure the UK is at the forefront of this effort.”
On Tuesday a huge blast ripped through the al Ahli hospital in Gaza City where hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge amid an Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip in the wake of Hamas’s deadly surprise attack on 7 October.
Hamas officials claimed the hospital blast killed hundreds of people and was caused by an Israeli air strike – but the Israeli military blamed a misfiring rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group and released imagery and communications intercepts aimed at supporting their case.
Mr Sunak’s trip comes after US President Joe Biden travelled to Tel Aviv on Tuesday, where he sided with Mr Netanyahu that the hospital strike appeared not to have been caused by Israel but “by the other team”.
But Mr Sunak – who held talks with the National Security Adviser and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee on Wednesday morning – said he would not “rush to judgement before we have all the facts on this awful situation”.
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‘Britain looking into Gaza blast’
Sky News reported on Tuesday that the prime minister could visit Israel this week, but Downing Street has only just confirmed this.
His trip will run in parallel with a trip by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who will meet leaders in Egypt, Turkey and Qatar over the next three days in a bid to help prevent the conflict spreading and to seek a peaceful resolution.
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Mr Cleverly said: “It is in no one’s interests – neither Israeli, Palestinian nor the wider Middle East – for others to be drawn into this conflict.
“I am meeting counterparts from influential states in the region to push for calm and stability, facilitate humanitarian access into Gaza and work together to secure the release of hostages.”
Mr Cleverly has cast doubt on the feasibility of a ceasefire, which dozens of cross-party MPs have called for as food, water, medicine and other supplies run low in Gaza.
Israel said on Wednesday it would allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the area – a decision which was approved in light of Mr Biden’s request during his visit.
Mr Sunak will press for that to enable the UK to deliver the £10m uplift in humanitarian aid announced earlier this week, and to enable British nationals trapped in Gaza to leave.
At least seven British nationals, including 13-year-old Yahel Sharabi, were killed in the Hamas raids on Israel while nine UK nationals remain missing – some of whom are feared dead or among the hostages taken back to the Gaza Strip.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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