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UK lawmakers Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed were denied entry into Israel on Saturday by the Interior Ministry, which cited their support for a boycott of the country. Both had made sharp comments about Israel during the ongoing war in Gaza.
While Mohamed openly condemned Israel, Young focused her criticism on the Israeli government and what she described as “horrors in Gaza,” without explicitly naming Israel or Hamas.
The two arrived Saturday afternoon at Ben Gurion Airport and claimed during questioning that they were visiting Israel as part of an official parliamentary delegation. However, according to the Population and Immigration Authority, the claim turned out to be false, and no Israeli entity had been informed of or authorized such a visit. The investigation further suggested that their true purpose was to document Israeli security forces and disseminate anti-Israel rhetoric.
Their deportation sparked outrage in the UK. Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned the move, calling it “unacceptable.”
In recent months, Mohamed alleged that “numerous organizations have found that ethnic cleansing is taking place in northern Gaza,” and claimed Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
On March 18, a day after Israel resumed airstrikes, she said that “Israel violated the ceasefire and killed 356 Palestinians, most of them women, children and the elderly. It bombed tents, homes and shelters indiscriminately. Families were buried under rubble, bodies are everywhere and the world remains silent.”
In February, she called for a boycott of “goods from Israeli settlements.” After arrest warrants were issued against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Mohamed urged the UK government to “reassess its relationship with Israel,” saying: “There must be accountability and justice for war crimes, no matter who committed them or where.”
Two weeks after the October 7 massacre — an event she did not mention — Mohamed described the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
In contrast, Yang consistently avoided naming Israel or Hamas directly. A search of her official X account for the terms “Israel,” “Hamas,” “October 7,” or even “terror” returned no results. Still, she repeatedly criticized Israel by denouncing “the horrors in Gaza” and targeting government policy.
In early January, she said: “Although we’ve entered a new year, the horrors in Gaza continue,” and demanded an update from the UK government regarding potential sanctions against Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
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In recent months, she indirectly criticized Israel by calling the war the “deadliest conflict for journalists,” noting that, while many of her colleagues were barred from entering, “Palestinian journalists are working in life-threatening conditions and fear for their lives.”
In November, Young criticized opposition shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel for attacking the International Criminal Court over its warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. “I was appalled to hear Patel criticizing the government’s decision to respect the Court’s ruling,” she wrote. “The UK has a duty to uphold international law and prevent future atrocities in Gaza.”
In December, Young praised UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini for his “brave work, despite so many obstacles, to ensure aid reaches where it's needed in Gaza,” — while ignoring the agency’s ties to the October 7 massacre and Hamas’s terror network.