The British Government is complicit in Gaza genocide - Yorkshire Post Letters

David Lammy has stated that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, nor that any of the British-made parts for F-35 jets sold to Israel have directly led to breaches of international humanitarian law.

In October 2024 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine produced an extensive report listing Israel's actions amounting to genocide. Since then, almost 25,000 more people have been killed.

This July Dr Omar Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies who grew up in Israel and served in the Israeli Defence Force, stated in the New York Times: 'I'm a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it. My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.'

He cited a number of Holocaust and genocide scholars agreeing with him, some of whom were Jewish.

At the end of July this year, two Israeli human rights groups, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, published reports stating that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The article reporting this in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz listed Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholars in agreement with this conclusion. Early this September the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated that Israeli policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide.

The UN commission of inquiry has just determined in a 72 page report that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza since October 2023, with the “intent to destroy the Palestinians” in the territory.

The British government position appears to be that only the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can rule on whether Israel has perpetrated genocide. They do this in the knowledge that a ruling will take years.

However, the ICJ has already considered that there was a “real and imminent risk” that Israel’s acts violated the rights of the Palestinians under the Genocide Convention. As such, third party States have a duty to prevent these violations.

Despite this, the British Government allows Israeli arms sales to be conducted in UK trade fairs, allows the sale of British parts of F-35 jets used to kill in Gaza, allows RAF reconnaissance flights to take place over Gaza sharing information with Israel, and welcomes the Israeli President who has said: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza”. There have been no UK sanctions against the state of Israel.

When the ICJ does determine that Israel has committed genocide, which given the evidence is inevitable, the British government will be held complicit in supporting that genocide. At the time of writing, 64,871 people have been killed in Gaza including more than 19,000 children. The British government will be held complicit in their deaths.