Declassified UK: A New Peace Fund Amid an Old Reality

Posted: 23rd June 2026

A New Peace Fund Amid an Old Reality

The United Kingdom has pledged more than £300,000 this year toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.

It comes as a new International Peace Fund for Israelis and Palestinians has been launched by the UK government.

The joint multi-donor initiative was announced by the Foreign Ministers of the UK, Australia and Canada with the intention of “establishing the conditions for a lasting peace.”

Each country will invest a total of one million pounds into the fund over three years.

“We are doing so at a moment of acute crisis in Israel and Palestine”, the joint statement read. “The last three years have exacted a devastating and dehumanising toll on civilians and deepened mistrust and division between communities.”

If the announcement was missed, it might have been because it landed just as Britain’s courts were busy classifying opposition to Israel’s genocide on the part of Palestine Action activists as terrorism, whilst the government was permitting an event being held in the UK that was facilitating further Israeli theft of Palestinian land.

The contradiction is particularly stark coming from a government that has spent the last three years arming Israel, sharing intelligence, training its soldiers in British military colleges, and shielding it diplomatically.

As Palestinians in Gaza recently told Declassified, discussions about peace processes seem completely detached from the daily violence they endure under the pretext of a ceasefire.

“This approach, supported by Britain and the Western community, does not reflect what we are living through.”

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The latest announcement is unlikely to dispel such concerns. In making the case for it, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper emphasised the UK “remains committed to a just and lasting resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict”, adding that “there is an urgent need to invest in the conditions that can make future peace possible.”

But those very conditions are being systematically eroded and two new reports underscore the scale of that reality in the Palestinian territories.

An Oxfam analysis found that the West Bank continues to face fast-tracked annexation, record forced displacement and the suffocation of Palestinian life.

They revealed more Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank in the last three years than in the previous 17 years combined, with child casualties following the same trend.

Amnesty International, too, documented the escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, noting that it is state-led and state-sponsored rather than the work of rogue settlers or extremist ministers.

For decades, Whitehall’s approach to Palestine has followed a familiar pattern: rhetorical commitments to peace that serve as a figleaf whilst Israeli policies methodically neutralise the possibility.

The latest initiative does not break with that tradition - it embodies it.

Hamza Yusuf

Regular Contributor
Declassified UK