Thornberry Presses Embassy HR Link to a Sanctioned Settlement

Emily Thornberry said a British embassy HR manager’s home in a West Bank settlement was, on its face, a flagrant breach of UK policy. Gila Ben-Yakov Phillips, deputy head of corporate services and HR manager in Tel Aviv, has owned property in Kerem Reim since 2022, official records show. The settlement is an Amana project. London put Amana under an asset freeze on 15 October 2024.

Thornberry, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said she would ask questions. Hamish Falconer, then answering for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, would not. He pointed to a longstanding rule against discussing individual staff.

Thornberry Calls the Embassy Role a Flagrant Breach

The records reached Westminster in November 2025. Ben-Yakov Phillips had worked at the embassy for 16 years. Her LinkedIn profile named the HR job. Kerem Reim sits in the wider Talmon area, north of Ramallah, on land the UK treats as occupied Palestinian territory.

Thornberry told interviewers the government had taken a strong stance on settlements, and that her committee has said ministers should go further.

So for a member of staff to be, on the face of it, in such flagrant breach is a matter of great concern and I will be asking questions about it

Emily Thornberry, Chair, Foreign Affairs Select Committee

Chris Law, the SNP MP for Dundee Central, put the same problem in plainer terms. If the UK government are to be taken seriously on pledges around illegal settlements, he said, they must make sure embassy staff are not actively adding to the harm on the ground. John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, asked for an urgent inquiry and for the findings to be published.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said it is long-standing policy not to comment on the personal details of staff. Ben-Yakov Phillips did not answer requests for comment. That is all the department offered in public.

Kerem Reim, Etz Efraim and the Deleted Posts

Kerem Reim was retroactively authorised by the Israeli government in 2017. It remains illegal under international law. Lior Amihai, who directs settlement monitoring at Peace Now, said Amana played a key role in establishing it, and that it was set up in breach of international law and, at first, Israeli law too. He said the placement was meant to break up Palestinian land and block a workable Palestinian state.

Amana’s own site advertised homes there from about $550,000, and sold the location as about 50 minutes from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Records also show Ben-Yakov Phillips owned property in Etz Efraim, a more established settlement closer to the Green Line. While she was on the embassy payroll she posted about both places. The posts sat in public for years and were later taken down.

THE POSTS THAT WERE TAKEN DOWN

• Childcare housing, 2023: One post asked childcare workers to take discounted rooms in “a young settlement, growing with a warm and loving community”.
• Youth programmes: Another advertised youth schemes in the same community.
• Etz Efraim synagogue, 2018: A third post asked for donations for a new synagogue there.

More than 85 percent of Talmon’s residents voted for the Religious Zionist Party in the last Israeli elections before those records were published. The party is led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has been under UK sanctions since June 2025 over repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian communities. Smotrich attended an event in support of Kerem Reim in July 2025. Amana head Ze’ev Hever was there too.

Sanctions Law Has No Small-Print Exception

Ben-Yakov Phillips bought the Kerem Reim house from previous residents, not from Amana, and she did it before the UK freeze. That timeline is not in dispute. The live question is what happened after 15 October 2024, when Amana became a designated entity under the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020.

Residents of Amana projects are charged a monthly fee by the company. Dror Etkes, director of Kerem Navot, which researches land use in the West Bank, put it in one line: if you live there, you pay. An itemised statement of that charge was described in contemporaneous reporting. Sara Segneri, a sanctions lawyer and partner at Confinium Strategies, said UK sanctions law has no de minimis exception, so any funds or economic resources can count, no matter how small.

If I have a company and I am paying an employee knowing that that employee is then sending money to Vladimir Putin, that’s potentially a sanctions violation. If she is making payments to one of the settlements that is sanctioned then I think there could potentially be a violation by the embassy.

Sara Segneri, partner, Confinium Strategies

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• The fee theory: Segneri said embassy salary that then goes to Amana as a housing fee could, if known, pull the mission itself into a sanctions problem.
• The purchase timeline: The 2022 sale was from earlier residents and predated the freeze, so the house deal itself is not a post-designation purchase from Amana.
• The department’s line: Ministers will not say whether they checked the fees, the social posts, or other local staff homes.

Etkes also said it seemed surprising that the British government was paying the salary of someone living in a house built by a company tied to an association the ministry was sanctioning. The department never answered that point on the record. The sharper legal argument is not that a local hire holds the wrong politics. It is that a designated builder may still be taking money from a home that a UK mission is, in effect, helping to fund through wages.

How Falconer Closed the Commons File

McDonnell tabled UIN 90113 on 12 November 2025. He asked whether the foreign secretary would conduct an urgent inquiry into Ben-Yakov Phillips’s continued employment at the British embassy in Tel Aviv, and whether she would publish the findings. Falconer answered on 19 November 2025, the same day Thornberry went public.

THE WRITTEN QUESTIONS AND THE REPLY

Falconer refused an inquiry into her employment in those terms, and he published no findings. Law’s question was sent back to the same sentence. The press line about “personal details” and the Commons line about “personnel and security matters” are not the same formula, but they do the same job. They close the file without saying whether anyone in King Charles Street, or in the Tel Aviv mission, looked at the Amana fee, the deleted posts, or the second property in Etz Efraim.

Law had also said he wanted to know when the department learned of the Kerem Reim holding, and whether other embassy staff own property in the occupied territory or have links to settler groups. Those asks never received a public, named answer either. The embassy employs about 50 people. The British consulate in East Jerusalem handles Palestinian affairs. Both offices mix UK diplomats and local staff. Local staff still fall under UK sanctions rules for the work they do on a UK payroll.

Amana’s Freeze Covered Builders, Not Just Outposts

When David Lammy, then foreign secretary, announced the October 2024 package, he did not describe Amana as a side character. The notice listed it as a settler organisation, UK Sanctions List reference GHR0142, OFSI group 16577, subject to an asset freeze. The statement of reasons said Amana provides funds and other resources to people engaged in cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and that it has profited from that activity. Specifically, it said Amana is involved in the construction of illegal settler outposts and in providing funding and other economic resources for Israeli settlers involved in threatening and perpetrating acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

The same announcement put an asset freeze on Amana and three outposts, plus three other groups. Lammy said the Israeli government must crack down on settler violence and stop settler expansion on Palestinian land. He cited a UN tally, used in that statement, of over 1,400 settler attacks on Palestinian communities since October 2023.

THE 15 OCTOBER 2024 DESIGNATIONS

Amana, the notice added, operates in practice as a commercial construction company. That is the detail that turns an HR address into a sanctions problem. Kerem Reim is not a nameless hill. It is a product Amana still knew how to sell. Washington later designated Amana as well, on 18 November 2024, with its building subsidiary Binyanei Bar Amana Ltd, and noted that the United Kingdom and Canada had already moved.

The Village Lost Land as the Track Became Homes

Kerem Reim did not arrive as a finished suburb. In Al Mazra’a Al Qibliya, the Palestinian village beside it, the mayor’s office described a familiar sequence: a dirt track, then a caravan, then dozens more, then the first standard houses. During a visit there in 2025, residents said they were blocked from farmland as the settlement grew. The village school sits on the edge of an open area into which Kerem Reim was expanding, a pace that picked up during the Gaza war and frightened parents. They also described losing a park that had been a meeting place.

Etkes said Palestinians in the area face frequent attacks from settlers. The UK statement of 15 October 2024 had already tied that pattern to the olive harvest, a season when organised settler groups disrupt Palestinian farmers. None of that proves Ben-Yakov Phillips took part in violence. It is the setting in which the embassy’s HR manager chose to buy, and then to advertise discounted rooms and youth programmes.

West Bank settlements hold a wide slice of Israeli society. Older sites nearer the Green Line, such as Etz Efraim, are often sold as cheaper housing with decent services. Smaller points deeper in the territory, such as Kerem Reim, tend to be more ideological. A UK mission that works “Israeli matters” from Tel Aviv still pays people who go home at night. In this case, home was a project of the very builder London had just frozen.

New Designations, Old Silence in Tel Aviv

On X, the argument that followed the records was not mainly about Thornberry’s adjective. It treated the monthly Amana fee as the part that could put the embassy itself in the wrong, and it treated Falconer’s personnel line as a refusal to say whether that fee had been checked. Historian William Dalrymple passed around the sanctions-law framing as if the breach were already proved. It was not. Segneri’s word was “potentially,” and it stayed there because the department would not discuss staff. After 25 November 2025 the public trail went quiet. No minister returned to the Commons with a review of local-staff addresses. No statement said Ben-Yakov Phillips had left, stayed, or been asked to move.

FROM THE AMANA FREEZE TO THE CLOSED FILE

1. 2017: Israel retroactively authorises Kerem Reim; the site remains illegal under international law.
2. 2022: Ben-Yakov Phillips owns a house there and lists it as her home address on financial documents.
3. 15 October 2024: The UK adds Amana and six other targets to the Global Human Rights sanctions list.
4. 8 November 2025: Property records of the embassy HR manager’s Kerem Reim holding are published.
5. 12-13 November 2025: McDonnell and Law table written questions seeking an inquiry.
6. 19-20 November 2025: Falconer cites personnel and security policy; Thornberry calls the arrangement a flagrant breach on its face.
7. 9 June 2026: Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper announces a further round of UK and allied measures aimed at settler violence. The public text does not mention embassy staff homes.

Cooper’s 9 June 2026 announcement set out co-ordinated sanctions against settler-violence networks with Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand and Norway. It said the UK would sanction six entities and one individual involved in financing, enabling and carrying out settler violence in the occupied West Bank, and it advised British businesses against activity in illegal Israeli settlements. That is the policy London wants on paper. It is also a list that still does not include a public answer about the woman who ran HR in Tel Aviv, or about the rest of a mission of about 50.

Falconer’s sentence remains the last official word on Ben-Yakov Phillips. The Amana freeze is still in force. Kerem Reim is still there. The department still will not say whether a UK salary and an Amana housing fee ever sat in the same month.