Palestine

Independent tribunal hears harrowing testimony about the massacres and destruction in Gaza and the UK’s complicity in genocide

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A two-day independent tribunal, just held in London, gathered harrowing information that included testimonies about the massacres and destruction in Gaza and evidence of the UK government’s duplicity and deception, and its complicity in the genocide being committed by Israel.

The tribunal was set up after the UK government rejected a bill introduced by independent MP Jeremy Corbyn (pictured above) that called on the government to establish an independent inquiry into UK involvement in Israeli military operations in Gaza.

One of the doctors who presented testimony at the tribunal, surgeon Nick Maynard, spoke of the horrors he experienced when working in Gaza: traumatic amputations without anaesthetic, profound malnutrition, and babies dying because there was no formula to feed them.

He spoke about a seven-month-old girl he helped look after when he was at the Nasser Hospital. “She looked like a newborn. You could see every bone in her body,” he said. “She was being fed with water mixed with sugar because we had run out completely of formula feed in Nasser hospital …

“She died whilst I was there and, four days before she died, a group of American doctors had brought in formula feed, knowing there was a shortage, and those doctors, at the border of Gaza, had every single bottle of formula feed removed deliberately by the Israeli border guards. Nothing else, just the formula feed.”

Maynard also spoke about an 11-year-old girl whose chest was severely injured by a bomb.

“I had to spend the whole night reconstructing her oesophagus, which had been destroyed by the explosive injury,” he said. The girl died four weeks later because doctors had no supplies to feed her.

Maynard says the infrastructure of the whole healthcare system has been almost totally destroyed in Gaza.

“We were operating with virtually no resources in the operating theatre,” he said. “Often no water to use to scrub up, to sterilise our hands and the equipment. Often no sterile gloves.”

He recalls patients’ screams as doctors had to treat them without any anaesthetic. One young woman’s face was burned so badly her facial bones were visible, he says. “She died an agonising death on the floor of the waiting area of the emergency room … we had no pain relief to give her.”

Maynard says the food distribution points run by the “obscenely named” Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are death traps, designed to create chaos and rioting “to facilitate the shooting of Gazan children”.

On his last trip to Gaza, Maynard spent most days operating on teenage boys shot by Israeli soldiers at the distribution points.

He says the teenagers were clearly targeted. One day, he says, 19 teenage boys were admitted to the ER, all of whom had been shot in the head or neck. The next day boys were coming in having been shot in the chest; the next day, it was the abdomen; the day after that, it was the legs.

“This clustering of injuries to particular body parts was beyond coincidence,” Maynard said. “It was clear evidence of target practice by the Israeli soldiers on these young teenage boys.”

The harrowing fate of children

Victoria Rose is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who has undertaken several humanitarian missions to Gaza, most recently working at the Nasser medical complex. She has treated large numbers of Palestinian patients with blast and burn injuries. She works with a charity called IDEALS.

“The mortality rate for a child during the war in Ukraine is estimated to be 0.7% and that for a child in Gaza is 37.7%,” Rose told the tribunal.

“I was operating on children every day, and, during my last mission, I would run a list of ten to 12 patients, and the first six would be under the age of 15, and these are children that have suffered blast injuries,” she said.

The children would either have been burnt by the heat or the fire caused by the explosion, had been directly hit by the explosion, or had been hit by shrapnel, Rose said.

“Anything around them when the bomb went off is then whipped up and ejected at very high velocity and hits them, so we were seeing children with bits of their body blown off,” she told the tribunal.

Rose gave harrowing details of the operations she had performed on six Palestinian children on just one day in May this year. One of them had had her left cheek and shoulder blown off.

“I then operated on a seven-year-old girl who had had her knee blown off, and my final case was a 13-year-old boy who had had his left ankle blown off, and his brother was being operated in the theatre next door.”

Rose said the doctors ran out of the required antibiotics. Disinfectant solutions had to be watered down and scalpel blades had to be re-sterilized.

Testimony from MSF

In her presentation to the tribunal, Natalie Roberts outlined what Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders teams are witnessing in Gaza and how the UK government failed to respond to MSF’s warning of genocide.

Roberts, who is the executive director of MSF in the UK, spoke about Reem Abu Lebdeh, a physiotherapist and member of the board of MSF UK who is believed to have been killed in her house in Khan Younis in December 2023 when the area came under a massive Israeli ground and air assault.

The bodies of Abu Lebdeh’s mother and sister were eventually recovered from the rubble in February 2024, but her body has never been found.

“Reem is one of twelve Palestinian MSF colleagues who have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023,” Roberts told the tribunal.

“There is no safe space in Gaza, and Israel’s indiscriminate military assault across the strip demonstrates that it considers the entire population as a legitimate target.”

Roberts said there was nothing humanitarian about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

“MSF medical teams are treating people with gunshot wounds, barbed wire lacerations, and crush injuries from stampedes sustained while trying to receive aid at GHF distribution sites,” she said.

Between June 7 and July 24 this year, in just two of the MSF facilities in Gaza, they received 1,380 injured individuals and 28 dead bodies from two GHF distribution sites, Roberts said.

“This represents only a fraction of the total number of people killed and injured at these sites,” she told the tribunal.

“During that same period, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that more than 1,000 people were killed and 7,200 injured while attempting to collect aid.

“One of them was our colleague Abdullah Hammad, who was killed on 3 July along with at least 16 people when they were targeted without warning by Israeli forces as they waited to collect flour from an aid truck in Khan Younis.”

Now, 87 percent of Gaza’s residents were crammed into just 12 percent of its territory, primarily in Al-Mawasi, Roberts said.

“This week Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where MSF teams work, received the dead bodies of at least nine people, including five children, who were killed while trying to collect water in Al-Mawasi, the area of Gaza that is supposedly designated as a safe zone” she told the tribunal.

Roberts said that, through the destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, shelters, schools, food production capacities, and water treatment plants, the Israeli authorities were “purposefully and systematically destroying the conditions necessary for Palestinian life in Gaza”.

Nasser was just one of many hospitals that had been repeatedly hit by Israel, she said. “Over 1,500 healthcare workers have been killed since October 2023, and hospitals are unable to function under the relentless bombardment,” she told the tribunal.

“Medical staff appear to be systematically targeted as one element of the deliberate dismantling of the health system in Gaza.”

Patients with trauma injuries, chronic diseases, communicable illnesses, malnourished children, and pregnant women were dying from preventable causes, Roberts said.

“During the 34 days while the UK Parliament was in recess, malnutrition rates among children under five tripled,” she added.

“Over 44,000 children are currently enrolled in our therapeutic feeding programmes. We are facing overwhelming demand at our four outpatient feeding centres across Gaza. Famine has now been declared in Gaza City.

“This is a complete and utter humanitarian disaster. And it is entirely man made.”

UK government deception

On the second day of the proceedings, former civil servant Mark Smith said he had been asked to alter the wording and placement of paragraphs and to omit key information in a UK arms export licensing report so that it “sounded less bad”.

He explained that the report he was asked to amend was one that assessed whether the UK government was legally compliant in exporting arms to certain countries, particularly when a given country was involved in armed conflict. He was the lead official dealing with that report.

“My role was to gather all of the relevant information on the situation: the air strikes, civilian casualties, precision of the weapons being used, as well as any kind of diplomatic efforts that were being made by the UK or the country in question,” Smith told the tribunal via an audio link.

“What I witnessed while working on that report was profoundly concerning.”

While Smith was working on the report, he was routinely asked to change it, he said.

“This was not to correct mistakes or to ensure accuracy, as would normally be the case with a Civil Service report, but I was actually asked to alter the wording, placement of paragraphs, and to omit the information so that it ‘sounded less bad’,” he said.

“This is absolutely counter to what we are trained to do as civil servants, and it’s something that I have never witnessed in my career, either prior to or following working on this particular report.”

Smith said he was routinely asked to go to senior directors’ offices and told to “make the situation look less bad”. He told the tribunal: “Those sections that I’d written which talked about civilian casualties, for example, I was asked to kind of play them down, make them smaller.”

The civil servants were told to delay the submission of the report until they could find something positive to add, Smith said.

“Everyone wanted to make it look as though we were on the right side of the law,” he told the tribunal.

Smith said he was told off for writing down his concerns. He said it was fully understood within his department that conversations about the arms licensing report were to be had in person.

He said there had been hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations within the walls of the Foreign Office on the most controversial aspects of the UK’s arms sales policy that would never be seen by the public and would never be discussed in a court, even a closed one, because the conversations were always person-to-person.

“Even with the whistleblowing team, I still got ignored by the Israel-Palestine team, the arms export licensing team,” he said.

“It took months and months and months. I kept asking and asking and asking them. They refused to talk to me. They refused to write anything down. They obfuscated and delayed, and it was very, very clear that I was being blocked out.”

Smith says he wrote to the head of the Foreign Office, the Permanent Under-Secretary, and the outgoing and incoming foreign secretaries, saying he had evidence of serious illegal activity taking place in the Foreign Office, but was completely ignored so had no choice but to resign.

He resigned from the Foreign Office in August 2024, saying that there was no justification for the UK’s continued arms sales to Israel.

“What I’ve learned from this is that the system is completely unfit for purpose,” Smith told The Gaza Tribunal.

“There’s no oversight. There’s no independent governance. It’s all left up to civil servants under immense pressure from ministers. And I think ministers are kind of hamstrung by their alliances with the USA and so on.

“So if it were up to me, I would focus, I think, on civilian boycott.”

‘Redesign by destruction’

The director of the research agency Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, told the tribunal that some of the destroyed buildings in Gaza that were being used as building material were actually mass graves. There were bodies in the rubble, some of which was being recycled. “We have seen evidence also of that rubble exiting Gaza into Israel as building material,” he said.

Weizman spoke of the destruction in Gaza as “ungrounding”: an attempt to reshape, “to redesign by destruction”, the kind of destruction in which nothing is left on the surface. “It’s not one in which buildings could, after a war, even if destroyed, be extruded,” he said.

‘Palestine today is a crime scene ‘

Professor of international law Richard Falk said the governments of the West had failed to uphold “the most vital elements of international law” and had been complicit in the violation of those vital elements. The UN had been paralysed as a result, he said. “The mainstream media have been integral to allowing complicit governments to hide the truth,” he added.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, speaking via a video link, told the tribunal that Israel wouldn’t have been able to transform an unlawful occupation into a genocide without the active support of far too many states.

Albanese said the UK’s retention of ties with Israel was unacceptable. The longer the UK retained these ties, the more it contributed to legitimising and normalising illegality and the festering of impunity, she said.

Palestine today is a crime scene, Albanese said.

Director of the British Palestine Committee Sara Husseini said: “We are witnessing one of the most heinous crimes in modern history. What is being inflicted upon Palestinians, our loved ones in Gaza, today will forever be remembered as a stain on our collective humanity.”

Professor of international law Ralph Wilde told the tribunal that the UK and other states mustn’t provide any support to Israel whatsoever (not just support that might end up being used to commit serious violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, or genocide).

Wilde said that any support given to Israel was going to end up, one way or another, supporting the existence of the occupation of Palestine.

He told the tribunal that the UK and other states could seek the permission of the representatives of the Palestinian people to send a protective presence into the OPT, including, but not limited to, the Gaza Strip, and to escort the entry by others to provide urgent relief.

Wilde added that Israel was not sovereign in the OPT and its wishes were of no legal significance. “If the necessary Palestinian consent were given, this would, by itself, be sufficient as a legal basis for such action,” he said.

“Endorsement by the United Nations General Assembly would be politically helpful, but legally unnecessary,” Wilde said.

Adviser to the Hague Group Guillaume Long talked about the ‘Bogota measures’ which, he told the tribunal, provided the kinds of enforcement of international law the UK “could easily and should absolutely be carrying out in the context of Israel’s crimes under international law”.

The UK was clearly in breach of its obligations under international law, “choosing instead to protect its arms industry, its shipping interests, its political alliances over the lives of Palestinians and its commitments under international law”, Long said.

He said the UK had not exercised “its universal jurisdiction powers to pursue perpetrators of crimes in Gaza” and had chosen instead political convenience over legal obligations.

UK has ‘gutted the rule of law’

The director of the Global Legal Action Network, Gearóid Ó Cuinn, told the tribunal that the UK had employed tactics that effectively rendered it a participant in Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Ó Cuinn said the UK had gutted the rule of law. He said it was riding roughshod over really important legal obligations, was facilitating cooperation with Israel, and had a complete disregard for the judicial and parliamentary scrutiny that would jeopardize that cooperation.

He highlighted the UK government’s duplicity, noting that it said in parliament that it was for the courts to decide whether Israel was committing genocide, but, in court, said that it wasn’t for the judiciary to decide and the government had made its own assessment.

The UK had withheld critical evidence, including a document on the sniping of children, and had a wholly unfit methodology to assess Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law that it used to make a determination that genocide was not occurring in Gaza, Ó Cuinn said.

‘The genocide could have been stopped long ago’

Genocide scholar Raz Segal told the tribunal that Israel had killed about 120,000 Palestinians in Gaza “and has created the conditions for the painful death of around 360,000 more”: almost half a million people out of a population of nearly 2.3 million.

Segal said Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians over the past 23 months had left well over 150,000 people with serious injuries and countless others suffered from trauma that would accompany them, if they survived the continued carnage, for the rest of their lives.

Citing UN data, Segal said 1 million Palestinian children in Gaza needed mental health and psychosocial support.

“Around 132,000 children between the ages of six to 59 months are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition through summer 2026, including over 40,000 severe cases,” he said.

Segal told the tribunal that the genocide in Gaza could not have happened, and continued, without the support of Israel’s Western allies, including the UK government. The genocide could have been stopped long ago, he says.

“As long as these governments allow the genocide to continue, as long as they continue to transfer weapons to Israel, as long as they continue to provide diplomatic and economic support to Israel, they are absolutely complicit in Israel’s genocide,” he said.

UK has ‘crossed into the territory of complicity’

Director of the International Centre of Justice For Palestinians Tayab Ali said that, by licensing components for F-35 fighter jets, which formed the backbone of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UK had “substantially facilitated international crimes and crossed into the territory of complicity”.

Ali said Britain had undermined the ICC. “It has questioned its jurisdiction, withheld support for arrest warrants and failed to facilitate investigations. Worse still, Britain stood by while the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, who is a British citizen, came under unprecedented attack.”

Journalist’s testimony

Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed fled Gaza after receiving death threats from Israelis and being diagnosed with severe malnutrition. He now lives in Ireland.

Abed told the tribunal said that it was only after leaving Gaza that he realised how “suffocated, subjugated and oppressed” people in Gaza had been. They had been “dying slowly” even before the current genocide, he said.

“We were always under an unprecedented, unbelievable scale of suffering before the genocide,” 22-year-old Abed told the tribunal.

“What you’re seeing at the moment is an extension of what Israel has been doing in Gaza over the past 20 years.”

Abed told the tribunal that, even before October 7, 2023, many people in Gaza died from cancer and other chronic diseases because Israel would deny permits for them to exit for treatment.

He spoke about, during the genocide, being obliged to eat food intended for cats and how he and his family suffered from stomach problems because they had been drinking contaminated water.

Abed also talked about his three-year-old niece in Gaza who, when they spoke on a video call, would cry for an egg, begging her uncle to bring her one. When the girl saw images of a watermelon, which symbolises solidarity with Palestine, she cried, asking her mother for watermelon.

“That’s what Israel has caused …,” Abed said. Children, he said, were literally drawing food in the sand, and started putting that sand into their mouths.

The suffering in Gaza, Abed says, has gone beyond imagination.

International media organisations and the committees to protect journalists have failed Palestinians in Gaza, he adds, and the Western media, he says, has facilitated the ongoing genocide.

“Had they done their job, this genocide would have been ended,” Abed told the tribunal.

(You can read Abubaker Abed’s heartrending story of having to leave Gaza here, in Drop Site News.)

Concluding remarks

In her concluding remarks at the end of Day 2, lecturer in international law Shahd Hammouri said: “The British government hasn’t only denied the British people’s right not to be complicit in the genocide, it has also denied its civil servants the capacity to engage and apply the law.”

Professor Neve Gordon noted that the tribunal had heard that 90% of Gaza’s population had been displaced; most of the people, many times, and many of them more than ten times.

“We have heard that there is no safe space in Gaza. We have heard how Israel’s destroyed almost every school in the Gaza Strip, and practically all of the universities. We have heard how children have been denied access to education,” he said.

When making his concluding remarks, Jeremy Corbyn, who is the founder of the Peace and Justice Project, said that Palestinians were telling him that things as simple as an onion were on sale in Gaza for £10 “and that if you have some money, foreign currency, and you need to change it, the money changer takes half of the money as a commission”.

On June 4 this year, Corbyn introduced a bill into the UK House of Commons calling on the government to establish an independent inquiry into UK involvement in Israeli military operations in Gaza, including the supply of weapons and surveillance aircraft and the use of Royal Air Force bases.

At the second reading on July 4, the government rejected the bill and refused to establish such an inquiry.

Corbyn says the Gaza Tribunal was established because “the public deserves to know the full scale of their government’s complicity in genocide”.

Just like in the case of Iraq, he said, the UK government was doing everything it could to protect itself from scrutiny.

“We will uncover the full scale of British complicity in genocide – and we will bring about justice for the people of Palestine,” he said.

A comprehensive report will be compiled based on the evidence presented to the tribunal.

 

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