Wes Streeting felt 'hitting a brick wall' over Gaza concerns, private messages reveal

Wes Streeting has said he felt he was “hitting up against a brick wall” when he tried to raise concerns about Gaza in government, after private messages from Peter Mandelson were disclosed where he was accused of being “hysterical” about the issue.

Among a huge release of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US, WhatsApp messages showed Mandelson being highly critical of Streeting to Pat McFadden, another cabinet minister.

In the messages, Mandelson discussed Streeting’s lobbying of the government in July 2025, when he was health secretary, to act on Gaza. Mandelson said he had received “a wild long hysterical message from Wes about Israel. I pushed back. I can forward but reflects pretty badly on his maturity in my view.”

McFadden said several days later that Streeting had circulated videos and a note to cabinet on Gaza, understood to be a dossier from three doctors, including two surgeons at prominent London hospitals, all of whom described their experiences of working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment.

Mandelson described Streeting’s intervention as “pathetic” and added: “I think Wes is experiencing an early mid-life crisis.”

In a statement to the Guardian, Streeting said he was “horrified by the war in Gaza”. He added: “In government, I did everything I could behind the scenes to get the government to act with the moral urgency the conflict demands. That included sharing the eyewitness testimony of doctors on the ground in Gaza, whose accounts needed to be heard at the highest levels of government to ensure that what was happening in Gaza wasn’t a war without witnesses.

“I wasn’t by any means the only cabinet minister pushing for action, but we often felt like we were hitting up against a brick wall. Our concerns and motives were dismissed.

“I’ve always supported Israel’s right to defend itself and Palestinians’ right to a state of their own. I’ve met survivors of October 7th and was the first shadow cabinet minister to visit Israel. I visited the West Bank a decade ago, I called for sanctions on Israeli settlements when I was a backbencher – this wasn’t some emotional or one-sided reaction; it is what I and other ministers believe.

“I was proud to be part of the government that eventually recognised a Palestinian state, but we took far too long to get there.”

Streeting’s 22-page dossier shown to fellow ministers, seen by the Guardian, contained multiple graphic images of children including babies with acute malnutrition and amputated limbs.

In the report, one doctor described operating on up to a dozen children a day, with many screaming in pain because there were no available analgesics. They said that half the casualties coming in were children, and all said they had never seen such extensive trauma on young children in their years of working in war zones.

Other messages between Mandelson and McFadden showed Mandelson describing Keir Starmer’s Downing Street as “beleaguered and bereft”, and on another occasion saying that the prime minister “lacks verve, as does the cabinet as a whole”.

In a message to Mandelson, McFadden said of Labour MPs about his then-role in the Cabinet Office: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’ They’re asking the wrong questions.”

Speaking to the media on Tuesday morning, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, said the messages were “embarrassing” but were in the public domain because of the government’s commitment to comply with the humble address motion passed by MPs in February to release all relevant information about Mandelson’s appointment.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “[McFadden’s] view has always been about an emphasis not on the benefits side, but an emphasis on giving people opportunities, and that’s what you’ve seen over the last week,” referring to the report by the former health secretary Alan Milburn on tackling youth unemployment.

Asked about the culture in the parliamentary party of demanding more spending on benefits, Thomas-Symonds said it was “not my experience, obviously Pat is talking there about meetings he’s been in. It’s not my experience.”