PHILADELPHIA — Ed Sheeran opened a concert on Saturday with comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, amid widespread backlash against the pop star after his opener, the rapper Macklemore, was dropped from the tour for making anti-Israel comments during his performances.

Sheeran began the concert alone on stage with no opener, but was joined by other musicians later in the show. He told fans that the controversy surrounding the tour “was about something much more important” than his music.

“I’ve had to take, and make, difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes, and I’m so, so sorry,” Sheeran said during the show at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.

He continued, “I don’t want to disappoint fans, and I’ve never wanted to be an activist musician, but this put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet.”

He then said he would “address the question of where I stand in the situation in Israel and Palestine,” though he said he did not want to be a political commentator or to focus his concerts on politics.

“What happened in Israel and at the Nova music festival on October 7th was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led terror onslaught in 2023 that launched a multifront war.

The onslaught included the massacre at the music festival, where hundreds of attendees were killed and dozens taken hostage, amid rampant acts of sexual violence. In total, the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,200 people and saw 251 abducted to Gaza.

He then turned to speaking about the war against Hamas in Gaza that followed, which leveled much of the Strip and caused a humanitarian crisis. He also criticized the situation in the West Bank as unjust, without naming Israel.

“What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. Our heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians’ lives, of children’s lives,” Sheeran continued. “And the systemic injustice we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank cannot be........

© The Times of Israel