At a Labour Party conference Monday, British Foreign Minister Ed Miliband, who is Jewish, received a standing ovation from the attending delegates after a speech in which he said that the suffering Israel had inflicted on Gaza is “a stain on the conscience of the world.”

Miliband called the approach of Prime Minister Andy Burnham toward Israel and the Palestinians a “reset,” telling those in attendance who he said were “moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people”: “We hear you. You were right.”

“We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank,” he said. “We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.”

“We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction, and British services for illegal settlements,” he declared, proudly adding that these actions “mobilized the international community” to follow suit “country after country.”

While Miliband acknowledged the Oct. 7 attack, he said that it did not justify Israel’s subsequent actions.

“Hamas’s murderous attack on October the seventh united the vast majority of the world in rightful condemnation,” he said. “But this, but this cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“This suffering, this suffering, is a stain on the conscience of the world, and I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere, who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right. And under Andy’s leadership, we have reset our approach,” he explained.

Addressing the Israeli government about the purpose of Britain’s sanctions, he added, “When it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government says we will not let you succeed.”

The foreign minister invoked his mother’s escape from the Nazis and her seeking shelter in Britain to say that “our argument is not with the people of Israel, but with the actions of its government.”

Miliband had announced the United Kingdom’s intent to sanction Judea and Samaria on Sept. 8, and the next day, the U.K., France, and Canada issued a joint statement about the ban, followed by another joint statement on the ban by Canada, France, the U.K., Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, in which they signaled that they had already implemented or were planning to implement measures against the region.

The catalyst for the ban was Israel’s planned construction of settlements in E1 in Judea, a section of land near Maale Adumim that is in Area C, which is under Israel’s total jurisdiction.

Israel retaliated by giving the British government 30 days to close its consulate in Israel, ordering British officials at the U.S.-led International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat to cease operations, and canceling the British Support Team that trains Palestinian Authority police in Ramallah.