A British government minister cited significant challenges in determining whether any citizens had been taken hostage after Hamas terrorists raided Israeli territory and captured civilians, while also cautioning British residents at home to be “extremely cautious” before celebrating the attacks or showing support for Hamas, which is a banned organisation in the UK.
The UK is “working very hard to know where British Nationals are” after the “shocking… absolutely outrageous” events in Israel, junior government minister Lee Rowley MP said Monday morning in comments reported by The Times, making implicit that work the government does not yet know how the enormous terrorist attack has impacted UK citizens.
Underlining the difficulty faced by the Foreign Office in identifying whether there are British citizens in need of help, Rowley explained that “there are many, many people who go in and out of Israel every single day” but there was a “significant challenge” in knowing whether any Britons were among those “from Israel who may have been taken into Gaza”.
British and American authorities were said to have been urgently investigating how many of their citizens had been captured or killed overnight.
The remarks come after two British citizens, Jake Marlowe and Dan Darlington, were named as missing on Saturday following the attacks. A report by public broadcaster the BBC stated it was not understood if Marlowe had been taken hostage, but that he had been working as a member of security staff at a party venue near the Gaza border as the attacks started.
Darlington had been visiting friends in Israel and had not been heard from since Saturday morning.
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While no precise figure has yet been reached, the number of hostages taken by Hamas terrorists in Israel in its Saturday raids has been reported variously as being in the multiples of dozens, and possibly into the hundreds. Women and children are among those snatched.
Concern for those taken will have intensified on Monday as, hours after UK minister Rowley’s comments on the government not knowing whether any Britons were among those taken, Hamas announced that some hostages had been killed, The Times of Israel reported.
A spokesman for the Hamas Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade said four Israeli hostages had been killed, but blamed Israeli forces for the fatalities, saying the bombing overnight had killed “four enemy prisoners and the martyrdom of their captors”. As reported by The Guardian on Sunday, it was believed those taken hostage would be “used as human shields in the likelihood of an Israeli ground assault”.
As well as revealing the difficulty the UK is having getting a handle on the situation for Britons inside Israel itself, minister Rowley also touched upon the phenomenon of residents in the United Kingdom appearing to celebrate the attacks, with Palestinian flags jubilantly flown in London, as well as several other Western cities. Noting that Hamas is what in British law is deemed a proscribed organisation — and making a display of support for it can carry a jail sentence of up to ten years — Rowley said that given “we have just seen a terrorist attack on Israeli soil, they are describing it as their equivalent of 9/11”, the government would “not encourage” people to go out and protest in support of Hamas.
While there is a right to protest, he said, there is not a right to “glorify terrorism”, and the minister said people in the UK should “be extremely cautious and should know exactly where the law is”.
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