LONDON — The British government is treating its sanctions regime against Israeli settlers and ministers not merely as a response to past abuses but as a deterrent designed to head off new ones, pressing ahead with measures tied explicitly to proposed West Bank settlement construction that has yet to begin.
That posture marks a meaningful evolution in how Whitehall has framed its approach to illegal Israeli settlements. Where earlier rounds of sanctions — against individual settlers in February 2024, outposts and organisations in May 2024 and October 2024, and then the far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in June 2025 — were presented as accountability for documented violence and incitement, the current discussion in government is explicitly prospective: can sanctions change Israeli behavior before a new settlement goes up, rather than after?
The question has become urgent. On June 3, Finance Minister Smotrich, who personally oversees settlement authorisations through an arrangement that grants his ministry control over the Civil Administration in the West Bank, announced that a planning committee had approved the construction of 2,162 new Jewish homes across three settlements — 1,006 units near Jerusalem, 922 near Nablus, and 234 near Hebron. “We are continuing to build the Land of Israel in practice,” Smotrich said in a statement, according to Reuters. In 2025, settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank reached its highest level since at least 2017, when the United Nations began tracking data. More than 500,000 Israelis now live in settlements across the territory, among roughly three million Palestinians.
The UK has been moving in incremental steps. When Smotrich was sanctioned a year ago alongside Ben Gvir, the stated basis was their incitement of extremist violence and what the Foreign Office called the “appalling and dangerous” rhetoric advocating forced displacement of Palestinians. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway joined the measures. The United States, under President Donald Trump, publicly condemned the decision. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time that the sanctions did not “advance US-led efforts” and urged the five countries to reverse them — a rebuke that London absorbed without retreating.
Since then, the calculus in Whitehall has shifted further. The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran and the widening regional hostilities have pushed the Starmer government further from deference to Washington’s preferences on Israel policy, according to Middle East Eye. The bilateral dynamic that once constrained British action — the risk of acting out of step with Washington — has weakened considerably.
Now the Foreign Office is weighing whether to attach sanctions directly to proposed construction plans — making clear that approving a specific settlement scheme will trigger consequences, not merely that violence committed by settlers already on the ground will be punished after the fact. That approach attempts to close the gap that critics of the existing regime have identified: by the time accountability arrives, the outpost is built, the land is taken, and the demographic facts have changed.
Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed, who sits on parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, has secured a debate on banning Israeli settlement goods — a step further than sanctions on individuals. “The ICJ’s ruling that no state should aid or assist in the illegal occupation of Palestine is now two years old and the UK is falling behind our allies,” she told Middle East Eye. The International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion in 2024, finding that Israeli settlements and the regime governing them were established and are maintained in violation of international law. An 85-nation statement backed by the UK, registered at the United Nations, condemned Israel’s February 2026 plan to register land in the West Bank as Israeli state property as a violation of that ruling.
The debate over what comes next in British policy is not only about deterrence — it is about whether the existing toolbox, sanctions on individuals and outposts, is structurally insufficient for the scale of what is happening. The Netherlands banned trade in goods from occupied territories last month. France and Sweden put forward a formal European Union proposal to enforce strict import controls on settlement goods. The EU itself, after Hungary dropped its long-standing veto, approved a new package of sanctions in May — this time focused more explicitly on individuals and groups pushing for de facto annexation than on those directly committing violence, a significant shift in framing that European officials acknowledged represented an escalation in intent.
Britain would be unlikely to move to a settlement goods ban independently, sources told Middle East Eye — but could do so in coordination with France or the Netherlands. Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer told Labour MPs late last year that such a ban is desirable, according to several people close to the government. The ultimate decision, however, lies with Downing Street. Several European governments are already moving faster than Brussels, imposing coordinated national-level measures as the pace of settlement approvals accelerates.
What Smotrich said when he learned of last year’s personal sanctions remains a precise expression of why the deterrence question is vexed. Standing at the inauguration ceremony for a new West Bank settlement — one he had just approved — he posted on social media that he had learned Britain had decided to sanction him “for obstructing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The timing couldn’t be better,” he wrote. Ben Gvir’s response to the sanctions was comparably defiant, invoking British history to cast the measures as a continuation of colonial attempts to suppress Jewish settlement.
That defiance is precisely the gap that British policymakers have not yet answered. If a minister announces a new settlement and sanctions follow, but construction continues regardless — because Israel’s government has made clear it will not change security policy under outside pressure — what has deterrence achieved? The question is not rhetorical: it is the reason why some within Labour are now pushing for trade-level measures that carry real economic weight, rather than personal restrictions on ministers who have already calculated that defiance is politically valuable at home.
The parliamentary Early Day Motion tabled in February 2026 noted that the Court of Justice had been explicit: not only must states recognise Israel’s occupation as unlawful, they “must refrain from any aid or assistance that maintains it and must take steps to prevent economic or trade activity that entrenches it.” Britain formally recognised the State of Palestine in September 2025, alongside France, Canada, and Australia — a decision the Foreign Secretary described as reflecting “a grave urgency” given the trajectory of settlement expansion. Recognition created new legal obligations; whether the government will interpret those obligations as requiring sanctions tied to proposed construction, rather than documented violence, is what is now under active consideration.
What the current debate does not resolve — and what no British official has yet said plainly — is whether the sanctions architecture that has accumulated since February 2024 has deterred a single settlement. The pace of expansion suggests it has not. Whether attaching consequences to plans rather than to completed facts changes that calculus, nobody in Whitehall is prepared to say with confidence.
