April 11, 2025 - 2:40pm
Israel’s decision to deny entry to Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang last weekend has drawn widespread criticism. Foreign Secretary David Lammy called the move “no way to treat British parliamentarians,” and both MPs were met with cheers when the issue was raised in the Commons. “This was not about security. It was about control and censorship,” said Mohamed, who has represented Sheffield Central since last year’s election. Meanwhile, Israel’s justification — that it has the “duty and authority to prevent the entry of individuals whose presence in the country is intended to cause harm to its citizens” — was largely dismissed.
Yemen-born Mohamed has a history of radical anti-Israel activism, and has aligned herself with individuals and organisations that have openly supported the terrorist group Hamas. The most egregious example came last October, when she attended a fundraising gala for the organisation Al-Arab in the UK and was given an “Outstanding Arab Personality” award.
During the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Al-Arab’s director Adnan Hmidan said in an interview on an Arabic TV channel: “What is happening now is a legitimate right to self-defence… occupation is the legitimisation of resistance.”
In a 2018 Facebook post, Hmidan declared “I love this man” below a photo of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and in another mourned the death of Mazen Fuquaha, a Hamas commander jailed in Israel in 2003 for organising a suicide bombing. He has often been photographed with others close to Hamas, including Muhammad Sawalha, a former Hamas commander in the West Bank. In 2021, Hmidan tried to sue the Labour Party to stop it employing an Israeli as a social media manager, claiming he was a “spy”.
Another politician honoured at the Al-Arab ceremony was Leanne Mohamad, an independent candidate backed by The Muslim Vote (TMV) group who came close to unseating Health Secretary Wes Streeting in Ilford North last year, running a campaign focused on Labour’s support for Israel. In the Commons register of interests, Abtisam Mohamed said she had been given three tickets for the event, with a total value of £2,000.
That same month, Mohamed urged her social media followers to attend a meeting in Sheffield addressed by Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla. He could only appear online, as he was barred from entering Britain for statements praising Hamas, endorsing the 7 October attacks, and spreading antisemitic conspiracies. Mohamed, however, told her readers that Mandela’s talk “should be really interesting” and that he was a “passionate supporter of Palestine”.
The following month she agreed to chair a meeting in Parliament organised by the Palestinian Return Centre, whose director Majed al-Zeer was accused by the Biden administration of being a “prominent international financial supporter of Hamas”. On this occasion she pulled out, citing “personal reasons”. But in January she made a speech at the annual dinner of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), thereby defying an official policy of “disengagement” adopted by both the Labour and Tory leaderships since 2009, after a senior MCB leader endorsed violence against Israel and UK service personnel.
The MCB has remained radical. Until January, its deputy chief was Mohammed Kozbar, chair of the Finsbury Park Mosque, who was photographed with the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on a visit to Gaza in 2015, when he also visited Sheikh Yassin’s grave and praised him as “the master of the martyrs of resistance”. Its new director-general, Wajid Akhter, was a TMV spokesman during the 2024 election, and so worked to unseat Labour MPs. In an article published in 2022, he urged parents to teach their children to identify “primarily” as Muslims, and as Britons only second.
Perhaps the most surprising part of the reaction to Mohamed’s expulsion from Israel was the fact that her record was not subjected to public scrutiny. This has extended to usually pro-Israel MPs such as Labour’s Luke Akehurst, who in the Commons referred to her treatment as “outrageous”, claiming she was a “moderate voice”. Others, of course, may disagree.
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