Rishi Sunak has abandoned moves initiated by Liz Truss to relocate Britain’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Downing Street has confirmed, The Guardian reports.
Truss, when she was prime minister, ordered a review into whether the UK should follow the Trump administration in moving the embassy from Tel Aviv.
Asked whether the UK government was still considering a move, a No 10 spokesperson said: “It has been looked at. There are no plans to move the British embassy.”
The development came after UK government officials told a group of foreign reporters that there were “no plans to move the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem”, a statement welcomed by the Palestinian mission in the UK.
Truss had told the outgoing Israeli prime minister, Yair Lapid, that she was conducting the review when the two met on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York in September.
The proposal met with a backlash from British church leaders, pro-Palestinian groups, Arab ambassadors in London, European foreign ministries and some Conservative MPs whose constituencies have large Muslim populations.
But the manner of the apparent U-turn, furtive even by the standards of the British Foreign Office, was perplexing since it came days after Sunak met Israeli and Arab diplomats to celebrate the second anniversary of the signing of the Abraham accords, which led to diplomatic relations being established between Israel and a number of Arab countries.
