Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Tuesday that Britain would recognize the state of Palestine in September if Israel does not agree to a cease-fire with Hamas, pouring pressure on the Israeli government to halt a war that has put Gaza on the brink of famine.
Mr. Starmer’s announcement, which came after an emergency meeting of his cabinet, is a sharp, if not wholly unexpected, shift in his position, reflecting the intense political pressure his government has faced as the public and lawmakers in his own Labour Party recoil from images of starving children in Gaza.
Mr. Starmer cast Palestinian recognition as part of a broader European effort to end the almost two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas. He reiterated that Hamas must release its remaining hostages, sign up to a cease-fire and accept that it will have no role in governing Gaza.
But Mr. Starmer’s move was aimed squarely at Israel, and it dramatized how swiftly sentiment about the war has changed among Western countries. Britain followed France, which announced last week that it would recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
“The situation is simply intolerable,” Mr. Starmer said on Tuesday. “I am particularly concerned that the very idea of a two-state solution is reducing and feels further away today than it has for many years.”
In addition to a cease-fire, Mr. Starmer said the Israeli government must agree not to annex the occupied West Bank and commit to a peace process that would result in a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
These are demands that Israel is highly unlikely to accept under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Mr. Netanyahu recently said that a Palestinian state could be “a launchpad to annihilate Israel.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli government was quick to condemn Britain’s announcement.
“The shift in the British government’s position at this time, following the French move and internal political pressures, constitutes a reward for Hamas and harms efforts to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza and a framework for the release of hostages,” the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement.
Britain’s decision will deepen Israel’s diplomatic isolation after it abandoned a truce with Hamas in March and resumed its military offensive in Gaza. It also carries significant symbolic weight, given Britain’s diplomatic stature, close ties with the United States and long history in the Middle East.
The British government played a central role in the creation of the state of Israel by declaring in 1917 that it supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in what was then Palestine.
Mr. Starmer had been ambivalent about recognizing a Palestinian state now, several officials said, because he viewed it as a “performative” gesture that would not change the situation on the ground and could, in fact, complicate efforts to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
But a chorus of warnings about rising starvation in Gaza, after Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food, changed his calculation. More than 250 lawmakers, including many from Labour, signed a letter to Mr. Starmer and the foreign secretary, David Lammy, urging Britain to recognize a Palestinian state at a U.N. conference this week that is devoted to the two-state solution.
Mr. Starmer’s action came after hours of meetings with President Trump on Monday at Mr. Trump’s golf resort in Scotland. The prime minister shared details of the European peace initiative with the president. Although it was not clear if he told Mr. Trump of Britain’s plan to announce recognition of Palestine, Mr. Trump appeared to give Mr. Starmer leeway to make such a move.
“I’m not going to take a position; I don’t mind him taking a position,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m looking to getting people fed right now. That’s the No. 1 position, because you have a lot of starving people.”
Critics of Britain’s move said that Palestinian statehood should not be used as a bargaining chip. Others said that it would do little to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and would deprive Britain of leverage that it could use with the Israeli government at a later stage in the crisis.
“I understand the impulse, but I don’t see the upside,” said Aaron David Miller, a former peace negotiator and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research organization in Washington.
Describing recognition as a form of “virtue signaling,” Mr. Miller said, “He has basically created a situation where he is not going to have maximum influence.”
Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the United States, said, “Starmer would have liked the idea of extracting something for the move.” He added, “Instead of a message to the Palestinians, it is a message to the Israelis.”
While Mr. Starmer attached conditions, Mr. Darroch said, “this conditionality, in my view, is 99 percent unlikely to work.”
History hung over Britain’s announcement.
Speaking at the U.N. conference on Tuesday, Mr. Lammy evoked Britain’s role in the creation of Israel, noting that the Balfour Declaration, the statement issued by the government in 1917, vowed that “nothing shall be done, nothing that will prejudice the civil and religious rights” of the Palestinian people.
“This has not been upheld,” he said, “and it is a historical injustice that continues to unfold.”
Mr. Lammy noted that Britain had suspended some arms sales to Israel and imposed sanctions on two of Mr. Netanyahu’s most hard-line ministers.
But analysts said the pressure on Mr. Starmer to do more had become impossible to resist. Several ministers in Mr. Starmer’s cabinet urged him to recognize a Palestinian state, arguing that the government needed to show it was not going to stand by in the face of an unfolding tragedy.
In recent days, Britain has airdropped aid into Gaza and evacuated injured children to British hospitals. It is also pressing to restart the U.N.’s aid pipeline. In Scotland, Mr. Starmer asked Mr. Trump to use his influence with Mr. Netanyahu to allow more food trucks into Gaza.
“We will keep working with all our international partners to end the suffering, get aid flooding into Gaza and deliver a more stable future for the Middle East,” he said on Tuesday. “Because I know that is what the British people desperately want to see.”
For Mr. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, the agonizing scenes in Gaza had signaled, he said, that “this is the moment to act.”
“Now, in Gaza, because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand — images that will stand with us for a lifetime,” a clearly emotional Mr. Starmer said to reporters.
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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