One of the first appointments by new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is already under fire after resurfaced pictures showed him in a meeting with Hamas members in Jerusalem in 2010.

Andy Slaughter, who was appointed solicitor general soon after Burnham took office as the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday, joined then-Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn on a fact-finding trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in November 2010, sponsored by Friends of Al-Aqsa and the pro-Palestinian nonprofit Middle East Monitor.

Pictures of the meeting, originally posted and since deleted by the Monitor, were published late Saturday by The Telegraph newspaper, which quoted the Monitor report as noting that the delegation met with Palestinian representatives of both Hamas and the rival Palestinian Authority’s Fatah party.

In his new position, Slaughter would wield significant power over decisions related to the prosecution of proscribed terrorist organizations, including Hamas, the Telegraph noted.

His appointment to that post was “an absolute disgrace,” shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy told The Telegraph, accusing Slaughter of showing “sympathy for Hamas.”

The photograph from the visit shows Slaughter and Corbyn alongside Mohammed Totah, Ahmed Attoun and Khaled Abu-Arafeh, all of whom held positions associated with Hamas.

Attoun was arrested by Israeli authorities and deported from Jerusalem to the West Bank in 2011. Totah and Abu-Arafeh were later arrested after spending 18 months inside an International Committee of the Red Cross compound in East Jerusalem to avoid detention and deportation by Israeli authorities for their involvement with the terror group.

Slaughter was a Labour MP at the time of the visit.

The MEMO description of the visit details the many accounts of “crimes” of the “Israeli occupation” including home demolitions, “ethnic cleansing,” and........

© The Times of Israel