LONDON: More than 130 senior UK legal figures told Prime Minister Andy Burnham on Tuesday that a ban on trade with Israeli settlements “falls far short” of Britain’s obligations under international law. The UK announced last week that it would prohibit all imports from settlements in the occupied West Bank and bar companies from providing services to those settlements. The measures were also adopted by France and Canada. But a letter signed by dozens of British lawyers and legal scholars said that the UK needed to go further in acting against the settlements and Israel’s occupation as a whole. They advised that there should be a wider Russia-style approach to sanctions against Israel, rather than just promising to target the settlements. The letter said that under an International Court of Justice advisory issued in 2024 and backed by the UN General Assembly, the UK had special obligations to act against Israel’s violations in occupied Palestinian territory. “We welcome the UK government’s decision to act alongside its allies, Canada and France, but the action covered in the recent announcement falls far short of what these suppression obligations require,” it said. “We ask it to commit to further and more rigorous measures to ensure that no part of the UK’s economic relationship with Israel continues to sustain the illegal occupation itself and the settlements and other serious violations of fundamental rules of international law.” The letter called on the government to adopt “robust coercive measures” to end Israeli violations “including, fundamentally, the occupation itself. The letter was signed by 18 king’s counsel — lawyers who have been recognized for their professional excellence — along with other senior barristers, solicitors and academics. It comes amid increasing international anger against settlement expansion in the West Bank that could end Palestinian hopes of an independent state and increased violence by settlers toward Palestinian communities in the territory. The experts compared the “narrow approach” toward Israel over settlements to the far wider sanctions regime adopted against Russia over the Ukraine invasion. UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the ban on services to the settlements included financing, construction, infrastructure, real estate and advertising. The legal experts said that this should be extended to include insurance, legal and accountancy, logistics, digital and technical infrastructure and investment and financing. “The UK cannot maintain that the Israeli occupation is unlawful, sanction those who build and finance the settlements and at the same time sustain them through its own market and its own procurement,” the letter said. Other measures they experts urged the government to take include ensuring pension schemes and sovereign funds do not invest in settlement-linked entities, pushing through a comprehensive sanctions regime for Israel and imposing a full arms embargo on Israel. They also called for tighter regulation to stop UK-based charities from supporting activities in settlements. Ralph Wilde, professor of international law at University College London, who helped draft the letter, told The Guardian newspaper that the “elephant in the room is the illegality of the occupation itself.” “There’s a mismatch between saying Israel’s very presence there is illegal but then only focusing on the question of the settlers and the settlements,” he said. “If the problem is with the settlements themselves, then the problem is with the state that establishes them.” A government spokesperson said that the settlement trade ban was “the biggest reset in the UK’s approach to protecting and securing the two-state solution in a generation.” In announcing the ban, which is expected to take effect in nine months, Miliband said that “settler terrorists” were carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the West Bank. While the action was welcomed by Arab governments, Israel reacted with anger. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar called the measures “despicable” and accused Miliband of “outrageous lies.” Israel ordered Britain to close its East Jerusalem consulate within 30 days and blocked 12 British politicians from visiting the country.