Hamish Falconer revealed that in his short time in office he has answered the most Urgent Questions of any minister in recent Labour governments
January 12, 2026 16:41
The Middle East minister has defended the government against charges that it is not pushing back strongly enough against claims that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Speaking at the Jewish Labour Movement conference on Sunday, Hamish Falconer was asked by the JC whether the government and ministers such as himself had done enough to push back against the delegitimisation of Israel by some MPs.
Last year, Heaton Park Rabbi Daniel Walker said that the terrorist who attacked his shul’s worldview was rooted in “the demonisation of Israel” and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said this weekend that describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide” cheapens the word.
In his response, Falconer made reference to evidence he gave before Parliament’s business and trade select committee last year. He said he outlined that the government had not determined that Israel was committing a genocide – which it considers a matter for international courts to determine – but that there were risks of breaches of international humanitarian law.
Falconer added that he “relatively regularly” gets “language around genocide thrown at me, both in Parliament, on the internet, in public” but even he has found it “tricky” to maintain the government’s position.
“We have found that there are serious risks of serious breaches of international humanitarian law, and trying to distinguish with Parliament and the public the difference between an assessment of risk and the determination of a competent international court has been tricky,” he said.
Although he recognised some of the criticism directed at him personally, he said he tried to “be as straightforward as I possibly can in my myriad parliamentary appearances about the nature of our position”.
That stance, he said, was “often mischaracterised, both by people who think it is a genocide, and by people who are appalled by the use of that language”.
During an interview earlier in the session with Labour Friends of Israel chair Mark Sewards MP, Falconer revealed that he had faced more Urgent Questions than almost any other previous Labour minister – including in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
He joshed that he was “still behind Matt Hancock”, who served as health secretary during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sewards had also asked Falconer whether there was “not more we could do to push back and say, well, ‘this isn't a genocide because it doesn't fit the definition’”.
Part of the reason he has not pushed back on the phrasing of every question, he said, was that: “I feel like if I argued with all the questions I got there, the hour and a half [sessions] would be it would be dragging out”.
As well as the frequency with which he is required to answer questions by MPs in relation to Gaza, Falconer, who was first elected to represent Lincoln in 2024, spoke about the volume of questions he faced at each time he is required to do so.
“I'm often on my feet for a very long time answering sometimes sort of 80-90, questions”, he said. Although he says he tries to set the proper tone for the discussion, to “make sure that the language that the public sees in relation to the debate is careful and considered, given the sensitivities of everything that is going on”, he said that some of the questions he is faced with are “totally objectionable”, while others were more reasonable.
In November 2024, the JC revealed that MPs had spent more time discussing Israel than they did the NHS in the year since Hamas’ atrocities on October 7.
Falconer was also questioned about whether the government would bring in measures to ban the IRGC, something which Labour ministers had pledged to do in opposition.
The Middle East minister, however, said that, as a former Foreign Office official who “who worked on counter-terrorism” he was “more circumspect” about the question because “the problem that Iran poses, in my view, is not the same problem that al-Qaeda posed. That the one of the reasons why Iran is such a potent threat is it has all of the resources and an apparatus of a state”.
That was why, he said, the government had commissioned Jonathan Hall KC to conduct his review into state-based threats.
He continued: “The delay in prescription is not because we think the IRGC are actually swell guys and it'll be fine. It's because we need to take action appropriate to the kind of threat that they project, not because we're of under any illusions about what a danger they are”.
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