Tom Bennett
BBC News
Reporting fromJerusalem
The UK government has announced sanctions on Daniella Weiss, a far-right Israeli settler known as the “godmother” of the settler movement.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the move “demonstrates our determination to hold extremist settlers to account as Palestinian communities suffer violence and intimidation”.
Weiss, 79, is the leader of a radical settler organisation called Nachala – or homeland – which has also been sanctioned.
For decades, Weiss has been prominent in the founding of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
In the sanctions sheet, she was described as having been involved in “threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals”.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson described the sanctions – which also target two other settlers, two illegal settler outposts, and two organisations – as “unjustified, and regrettable”.
Weiss was recently featured in Louis Theroux’s documentary “The Settlers” – and has been active in the movement to rebuild settlements in Gaza.
Speaking to BBC News last year, she said: “Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews.”
“The world is wide,” she added. “Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza. How we do it? We encourage it. Palestinians in Gaza, the good ones, will be enabled. I’m not saying forced, I say enabled because they want to go.”
In response to the sanctions, Weiss said hundreds of families “are prepared and ready to implement settlement in Gaza – immediately”.
Nachala called for “conquest, immigration and settlement in Gaza” and added that it wants Israel to “continue the war until the enemy is destroyed”.
The UK also announced sanctions on two other settlers – Zohar Sabah and Harel David Libi, as well as the outposts Coco’s Farm, and Neria’s Farm, and the organisation Libi Construction and Infrastructure LTD.
Outposts are settlements built without official Israeli authorisation.
“The Israeli government has a responsibility to intervene and halt these aggressive actions. Their consistent failure to act is putting Palestinian communities and the two-state solution in peril,” Lammy added.
Additionally, the UK government announced it would pause free trade negotiations with Israel with immediate effect, saying “it is not possible to advance discussions” with “a Netanyahu government that is pursuing egregious policies in the West Bank and Gaza”.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson responded: “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.”
The move follows a strongly-worded joint-statement from the leaders of the UK, France and Canada on Monday which called on the Israeli government to “stop its military operations” and “immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza”.
Israel has said it will allow a “basic amount of food” into Gaza, ending an 11-week blockade of the territory, which it said was aimed at pressuring Hamas to release remaining hostages.
But United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said the amount of aid was a “drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed”.
