Leaders of the UK and Canada faced domestic criticism on Sunday after they officially announced that their countries recognized a Palestinian state alongside Portugal and Australia.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately condemned the announcements, saying he was considering Israel’s response to the countries and vowing that a Palestinian state would never be formed.

But opposition also came from within the countries that recognized a Palestinian state.

The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, decried her country’s step as “absolutely disastrous” in a post on X.

Badenoch responded to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement of the decision, saying that the UK “will all rue the day this decision was made.”

The move “leaves hostages languishing in Gaza and does nothing to stop the suffering of innocent people caught in this war” while simultaneously “rewarding terrorism with no conditions whatsoever put in place for Hamas,” she added.

The head of the right-wing Reform UK party, Nigel Farage, condemned the announcement in a conversation with Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday evening, the Israeli minister said in a post on X.

“I thanked him for his friendship and told him that in Israel, we know to distinguish between the British people and their government,” Sa’ar wrote, adding that the two had discussed Hamas’s praise of the British government’s decision.

Meanwhile, Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre attacked Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in an X post on Sunday, saying that his decision to recognize the “Hamas state” was “another effort to........

© The Times of Israel