UK ban on Hamas will have ‘chilling effect', warns politician

Proposals by the UK's conservative-led government to designate Hamas as a "terrorist organisation" have been criticised by opponents who warn that it would have a "terrible chilling effect" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A former minister from within the ruling party in the UK, Crispin Blunt, speaking in parliament, said that while he did not support Hamas as "the gay chair of the All-Party Humanist Group," he did not believe the government approach to the conflict was wise.

"My own personal position is that the two-state solution is long gone. That in the end, the only way this is going to be resolved is actually by the people coming together and us enabling that to happen, helping it to happen, and I fear that this measure today does precisely the opposite."

On the government's proposal, he added: "It is going to have a terrible chilling effect on putting anything into Gaza because Gaza is administered by the organisation we are about to proscribe."

The Conservative MP also suggested that Hamas had "under international law, a legal right to resist."

He said: "Whilst we have already taken a position on what is plainly the stupid, illegitimate, immoral, mortaring of people where you can't tell where the targets are simply by flying weapons over the wall because you don't have the capacity to engage in that targeting of what would be legitimate targets under international law as resistance.

"Of course, that's the definition, those acts are illegitimate, and that's why they have been proscribed, but we need to be careful here because people do have a right to resist."

Pro-Israeli voices were quick to attack Blunt's straight-talk with one saying, "MP Crispin Blunt suggests that # HAMAS' indiscriminate violence against # Israel's civilians is merely an incidental fact of it lacking the technology to target military installations, disagreeing sharply with HAMAS, which has stated its intention to massacre Jews everywhere it can."

Last week the British government announced plans to label the whole Palestinian Hamas movement as a terrorist organisation.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will push for the change in parliament arguing that it is not possible to distinguish between Hamas' political and military wing.

The al-Qassam Brigades military wing of the movement has been banned in Britain since March 2001.

The Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem called the move "a crime against our Palestinian people and all their history of struggle, as well as a condemnation of the legitimate struggles of all free peoples against colonialism."

In May of this year, Israel attacked Gaza in actions that were internationally condemned.

Over 11 days, Israel pounded Gaza with airstrikes as Gazans fired back rockets from the enclave, leaving more than 250 Palestinians dead and thousands wounded.