REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, LONDON - A British minister who was the first Muslim to sit in the cabinet resigned on Tuesday over the government's "morally indefensible" policy on Gaza. The decision by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a minister at the Foreign Office and for faith and communities, heaped fresh pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to take a tougher line against Israel over its actions in Gaza.
His coalition government has faced sustained criticism in recent days, led by the main opposition Labour Party, that it has not spoken out strongly enough over a conflict that has killed 1,867 Palestinians and 67 people on the Israeli side.
"Our approach... in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain's national interest and will have a long-term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically," Warsi wrote to Cameron in her resignation letter, as reported by AFP.
She said there was "great unease" in the Foreign Office, where Philip Hammond took over as Foreign Secretary from William Hague last month, about how recent policy decisions had been made.
Warsi's parents were Pakistani immigrants and she trained as a lawyer before being made a member of parliament's upper House of Lords in 2007. She was appointed to Cameron's cabinet when his coalition government took power in 2010 but was shuffled out of the full cabinet, the powerful inner circle of government ministers, in 2012.
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