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On Tuesday, over 130 legal experts sent a six-page letter to U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, stating that the newly-announced sanctions on Israel are insufficient to meet the U.K.’s obligations under international law.

On September 8, the U.K. government announced a set of sanctions banning imports from illegal settlements in the West Bank and penalizing companies and individuals providing services used for settlement expansion. The sanctions were announced in response to escalating settler violence and Israel’s steps to begin developing the E1 settlement, which would make a contiguous Palestinian West Bank impossible.

“We welcome [the sanctions] as a necessary corrective to a position long overdue for correction,” the lawyers and legal academics wrote in their letter to Burnham on Tuesday. But the announcement “falls far short” of the obligations put forward by a 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, they said.

The letter elaborated that the sanctions on Israel, when compared to those adopted against Russia for its crimes in Ukraine, “are improperly narrow.” The sanctions against Russia target “the wider economic structures supporting [Russia’s] unlawful conduct,” not just those within Ukrainian territory – and this should be the same with the U.K.’s sanctions on Israel, they asserted. Sanctions must ensure that the U.K. is not propping up Israel’s occupation, beyond simply the illegal settlements.

In addition to calling for an........

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