Who is the real Wes Streeting? His record on Israel and foreign policy examined

British Health Secretary Wes Streeting has launched what many MPs are calling a "coup" in a bid to become the Labour prime minister.

Streeting is believed to be poised to resign from the cabinet and kickstart a leadership challenge on Thursday after he met Prime Minister Keir Starmer in 10 Downing Street for just 10 minutes on Wednesday morning.

For the health secretary and MP for Ilford North, the attempt to become a prime minister is a race against time.

Wes Streeting, who is aligned with the right of the Labour Party, is aiming to oust Keir Starmer before the party’s soft left can rally behind an alternative candidate - particularly Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who could mount his own challenge if he returns to parliament.

Labour Together, the think tank that propelled Starmer to power, is widely believed to be backing Streeting to maintain its influence in government after Starmer is gone.

Whoever emerges as victor, British foreign policy is likely to shift - particularly towards Israel, with which the UK has maintained long-standing military and political cooperation. 

Israel has been a significant issue in British politics over the past two-plus years because of its genocide in Gaza. And in the past few months, the US-Israeli war on Iran has had an economic impact on Britain. 

The Green Party, the leading political voice against British support for Israel, inflicted far more damage on the Labour vote than Reform in the local elections.

This could mean a shift in Britain's foreign policy. But what would Streeting do?

What are his real views on Israel - those expressed in private or those aired publicly?

Does he support sanctions on Israel, as he has told close allies, or will he attack pro-Palestinian campaigners as sectarian, as he has done in recent months?

Middle East Eye examines Streeting's mixed and often contradictory record on Israel and the Middle East.

A Labour Friend of Israel

Streeting is a member of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) lobby group. A parliamentary source said he regularly meets with LFI in Westminster.

He has also received donations from Trevor Chinn, a 90-year-old philanthropist and former car industry mogul who was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour for service to the State of Israel in November 2024.

Chinn gave Streeting more than £15,000 ($20,200) between 2021 and 2024. The following year, with Streeting as health secretary, he also gave him £5,000 to "support campaigning in Ilford North".

The organisation's accounts show that between 2015 and 2018, it paid over £1m to Hashomer Hachadash, a Zionist militia that operates in the occupied West Bank.

Chinn is a long-time supporter of LFI and its Conservative counterpart, Conservative Friends of Israel.

Two officials who worked in the government of former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair described Chinn, who was brought in to advise them, as a "very strong supporter of Israel".

In February 2016, he went to Israel and the occupied West Bank on a trip organised by Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

Streeting met Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. He visited a Palestinian community school in Khan al-Ahmar, which at the time was facing intimidation from Israeli settlers and soldiers.

Streeting was then the first member of Labour's shadow cabinet to visit Israel after Starmer was elected leader on a trip funded by LFI.

He described it as a four-day "fact-finding mission" and met with Israeli politicians, diplomats, academics and health experts. 

"I wanted to return to Israel to see the incredible advances in medical technology being developed here, some of which blew me away," he said afterwards.

"Israel is 10 years ahead of the NHS [National Health Service]."

Opposing a ceasefire and backing Labour policy

After the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Labour, then in opposition, backed the Conservative government's policy of supporting Israel as it besieged and bombed Gaza.

Speaking to Sky News on 25 October 2023, Streeting accused Hamas of "cowardly using innocent civilians, children, women, men as human shields" - a claim routinely deployed by the Israeli government.

Streeting also repeated Israel's assertion that “Hamas uses buildings like schools and hospitals as bunkers".

In line with party policy, Streeting refused to support a ceasefire but called for a "humanitarian pause".

"Israel is a democracy," he said. "It has rules to abide by. I don't know if Hamas will abide by the rules for a pause."

In January 2024, Streeting described South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide as a "distraction from what needs to happen, which is the diplomatic heavy lifting to bring about an end to this conflict".

By that point, however, he was more vocally critical of Israel. "You look at the scale of the bloodshed, you look at the scale of destruction in Gaza, the number of civilian casualties," he said in an interview. "They are disproportionate, and it's horrible."

In the 2024 general election, Streeting only narrowly retained his Ilford North seat, with British Palestinian independent candidate Leanne Mohammed coming within 600 votes of unseating him. The result was seen as an indicator of widespread anger in the constituency over Labour policies, including its support for Israel.

A Labour source who knows Streeting said that as health secretary and a member of the cabinet, he privately pushed Starmer to strengthen his criticism of Israel. 

Under Labour, diplomatic relations became increasingly strained between Britain and Israel, with the UK introducing a partial arms embargo on Israel in September 2024.

However, Starmer's government continued to cooperate militarily with Israel throughout its genocide in Gaza, most significantly by launching hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza and sharing intelligence with Israel.

In March 2025, Starmer rowed back on remarks made by then Foreign Secretary David Lammy that Israel was committing a "breach of international law".

Streeting stopped short of publicly accusing Israel of war crimes, but he strengthened his criticism. In April, he said Israel's attacks on Gaza were "intolerable" and "cannot be justified as self-defence".

In September, he went even further and said its actions in Gaza were "leading Israel to pariah status". Streeting added that Israeli President Isaac Herzog "needs to answer the allegations of war crimes, of ethnic cleansing and of genocide that are being levelled at the government of Israel".  

Text messages with Mandelson

However, what Streeting said in private was markedly different.

In February 2026, text message correspondence between Streeting and Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the US and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, was leaked.

Multiple Labour sources told MEE that the leak was engineered by Streeting to shore up support for himself as the next prime minister and to pile further pressure on Starmer.

One source said Streeting was "intelligently presenting himself as more critical of Israel than Labour policy".

The released text messages revealed that Streeting feared becoming "toast at the next election" in his Ilford North seat.

Streeting told Mandelson in July 2025 that Israel was "committing war crimes before our eyes" and endorsed sanctions on the state. 

He said the Israeli government "talks the language of ethnic cleansing, and I have met with our own medics out there who describe the most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children".

Streeting added that he had "never been a shrinking violent [violet] on Israel". He said he had supported lobby group LFI "for over 20 years". 

He accused Israel of "rogue state behaviour. Let them pay the price as pariahs with sanctions applied to the state, not just a few ministers".

While some applauded Streeting, others criticised him over the leaked messages.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn wrote a letter to Streeting accusing him of a "shameful failure" for not resigning while privately condemning Israel's war crimes in Gaza.

He pointed out in his letter that "once a government acknowledges that Israel is committing war crimes, then any continued military or political support is an admission from the government that it is knowingly aiding and abetting those war crimes".

He added: "It is now a matter of public record that you decided to serve in the cabinet of a government that was providing military, economic and diplomatic support to a state that was breaching international law."

Corbyn asked Streeting: "If you believe Israel was committing war crimes, why did you not resign from a government that was continuing to provide military and economic support to Israel?"

Corbyn further asked: "Can you outline the specific steps you took to end this government’s military and political support for Israel?"

Corbyn told MEE that Streeting had not responded to his letter.

Will the real Wes Streeting please stand up?

Ahead of the local elections, the health secretary took aim at politicians in his seat who criticised Labour's policy on Israel. He raised the alarm on what he called "sectarian politics" in the east London borough of Redbridge during the campaign.

Streeting's seat is in Redbridge, the Labour stronghold where the Redbridge Independents, backed by Corbyn's Your Party, won nine seats last week.

MEE reported in March that Streeting sent a letter to residents of his seat accusing the Redbridge Independents, a local party backed by Your Party, of being "a divisive political party that aims to only represent some of us, more focused on foreign conflicts than on fixing potholes".

Then, in April, Streeting told The Times: “We’re voting for Redbridge council, not the UN Security Council. Who you choose to run your local council matters and the Redbridge Independents represent a divisive brand of sectarian politics.”

However, while launching Labour's local election campaign, Starmer himself turned foreign policy into a campaign issue when discussing the Iran war, attacking the Reform leader Nigel Farage and the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

He argued that Britain would have been “in a war without a plan” had they been in power, adding that he “won’t be dragged in” to the US-Israeli war.

Labour MP and former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell criticised Streeting's campaign letter, telling MEE that "one interpretation verges on a Reform [style] dog whistle politics. The last thing we need is more divisive politics in these elections".

One of Britain's most high-powered politicians and potentially the next prime minister, Streeting remains, to most people, an enigma.

His views on foreign policy, as on many other issues, appear different depending on who he is speaking to. 

If Streeting launches a leadership challenge, he will be forced to articulate his own approach to British foreign policy.