BRITISH CITIZENS FIGHTING FOR ISRAELI ARMY FACE GAZA WAR CRIMES CLAIMS: REPORT

Mon 07 April 2025:

A team of lawyers in the UK plans to file a war crimes complaint today against 10 British citizens who took part in Israel’s war in Gaza, reports The Guardian.

The complaint accuses the Britons of involvement in “indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas” and “coordinated attacks on protected sites including historic monuments and religious sites”, among other crimes, according to the daily.

Prominent barrister Michael Mansfield, who is among the lawyers engaged in the case, said, “British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”

“If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it,” The Guardian reported, quoting Mansfield. “Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.”

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Israel has persistently denied that its political leaders or military have committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza, in which it has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians. The military campaign was in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people, also mostly civilian, were killed and a further 250 taken hostage.

Mansfield, who is known for his work on landmark cases such as the Grenfell Tower fire, Stephen Lawrence and the Birmingham Six, said: “If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.

“British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”

The report, which has been submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), covers alleged offences committed in the territory from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile.

Each of the crimes attributed to the 10 suspects, some of whom are dual nationals, amounts to a war crime or crime against humanity, according to the report.

One witness, who was at a medical facility, saw corpses “scattered on the ground, especially in the middle of the hospital courtyard, where many dead bodies were buried in a mass grave”. A bulldozer “ran over a dead body in a horrific and heart-wrenching scene desecrating the dead”, the witness said. They also said a bulldozer demolished part of the hospital.

Sean Summerfield, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who helped compile the dossier, said it was based on open-source evidence and witness testimony, which together presented a “compelling” case.

“The public will be shocked, I would have thought, to hear that there’s credible evidence that Brits have been directly involved in committing some of those atrocities,” he said, adding that the team wanted to see individuals “appearing at the Old Bailey to answer for atrocity crimes”.

The report says Britain has a responsibility under international treaties to investigate and prosecute those who have committed “core international crimes”.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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