Lord Cameron visits Washington as Gaza strategy faces new scrutiny
Lord Cameron said he still supports the sale of British weapons to Israel, as ITV News Correspondent Robert Moore reports
Six thousand miles away from the horror of Gaza, the Foreign Secretary and the US Secretary of State held a press conference in Washington.
It is a truly wretched time to be leading Western foreign policy.
Everywhere David Cameron and Anthony Blinken look, they see disaster and suffering.
From Ukraine to Gaza, from Sudan to Haiti, from the Red Sea to the Black Sea.
Worse than that, they face mounting accusations of complicity.
As the death toll climbs to over 33,000 in Gaza - mostly innocent women and children - there are increasingly urgent questions about why the US and UK governments are still providing weapons to Israel.
It was a question I put to Lord Cameron directly.
Passions and arguments are coursing through our communities, I pointed out, so why shouldn't people know what legal advice the British government is receiving?
Are we in breach of international humanitarian law?
His reply? The legal advice stays secret, and - yes - Britain will keep providing weaponry.
Blinken looked pretty ashen. After six months of the Gaza war, his diplomacy is in ruins.
Following the Hamas massacre of October 7, the US embraced Israel with extraordinary levels of military, political, and diplomatic support.
That strategy purchased Washington no leverage. Israel conducted the war without regard to American concerns.
More recently, Biden and Blinken have urged Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Netanyahu has brushed such pleas aside.
It has exposed the world's great diplomatic superpower as weak and feckless, even when dealing with an ally to which it gives vast amounts of military support.
Blinken's patience with Israel appeared only to break last week when Israel targeted and killed seven international aid workers.
So I asked America's top diplomat why he hadn't expressed similar outrage much earlier in the war after the death of hundreds of Palestinian humanitarian workers and journalists.
He gave an impassioned response, saying his heart broke for all civilian casualties.
But then he pivoted and Blinken told me that he was "astounded that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas...Where is the outrage there?"
As he knows, there has been worldwide outrage at Hamas' atrocities on October 7.
Cameron and Blinken left the press conference looking glum.
Global diplomacy appears broken and the transatlantic relationship is struggling to cope with the scale of the challenges on the battlefields of Ukraine and the Middle East.
Indeed, add one more wartime casualty to the list. Western diplomatic credibility.
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