The following is an open letter to British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Greetings Prime Minister Starmer,

Please be urged today, April 4, 2025, to use your office to facilitate an immediate resumption of the ceasefire in Gaza. This to end the continued, inhumane devastation being visited on those people — especially the children.

The United Nations reports that since the Israeli Government’s unilateral ending of the ceasefire, an average of 100 children are being killed daily.

Based on available surveys, a significant majority of British citizens support a ceasefire.

April 4 evokes the spirit which motivated the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated on that date in 1967. King’s example has inspired millions across the globe facing terror with an unwavering reverence for all. Within two months of the bus boycott, King’s home was dynamited — luckily sparing his wife and newborn child — in the first of a litany of terror.

King’s reverence for life led to his April 4, 1967 clarion call opposing his government’s war on Vietnam. He had the same consideration for the children of Vietnam as he did for those of Atlanta, London and everywhere.

My upbringing exposed me to these examples. That inspiration led me, in August 1970, to facilitate a local response to the British Government’s announced sales of weapons to the apartheid regime of South Africa. A small group of us demonstrated near City Hall, protesting Britain’s unashamedly public complicity with apartheid.

In 1977, while attending King’s College London, having been involved in the campaign against the hanging of two Bermudians, I was summonsed to Westminster for an informal meeting with a group of Labour Lords. However, their optimism that British principles on capital punishment would apply did not prove valid at that time. The resultant violence in Bermuda led to the loss of five lives, with British troops involved.

However, since that date there remains no capital punishment in Britain or any of its Overseas Territories.

Since the 1977 tragedy, MLK’s example of nonviolence took root in Bermuda, with no “social violence” since. In 1981, Bermuda experienced its largest labour dispute — a general strike — which ended peacefully.

Later that same year, a sustained Bermuda anti-apartheid movement emerged, which for more than a decade closely collaborated with the British and global anti-apartheid movements, doing our part in shifting the US and British governments’ positions on apartheid.

In contrast to the stance of Downing Street at that time, please be encouraged to reflect on the example of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr and facilitate a return to ceasefire in Gaza as a most urgent matter for those children’s lives.

• Glenn Fubler represents Imagine Bermuda