Mike Phipps reviews The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide, by Jeremy Corbyn, Neve Gordon and Shahd Hammouri, published by Pluto.

When the Starmer Government blocked Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn’s Private Members’ Bill calling for an public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the former Labour leader and others decided to hold their own Tribunal. Over the course of two days, he and international law experts Dr Shahd Hammouri and Professor Neve Gordon heard from a range of witnesses. Its findings are published in this book, which like the original Tribunal, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

In his Preface, Jermey Corbyn calls for an end to all military cooperation with Israel, economic sanctions, an end to the criminalisation of anti-genocide protest and the de-proscription of Palestine Action, alongside support for international efforts to enforce the International Court of Justice ruling regarding Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

By the time the British Government imposed a limited suspension of arms licenses to Israel, affecting less than a tenth of the relevant 350 licenses, over 40,000 Palestinians, including more than 10,000 children, had been killed in Gaza. Those numbers have since doubled. Crucially the arms restriction omitted the continued supply of parts for Israel’s F-35 jets, used to drop massive bombs of the kind used on the al-Mawasi camp, which killed 90 Palestinians in one strike. Britain’s involvement in such a massacre underlines the urgency of this Tribunal.

Mass assassination

The Tribunal heard testimony about the mass assassination of civilians, the systematic attacks on the Palestinian healthcare system, Israel’s banning of all foreign news journalists from entering Gaza and its elimination of media institutions there. More journalists were killed in Gaza than the number of journalists who died in the US Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined. It heard about Israel’s deliberate creation of a famine, its destruction of almost all schools and every university in Gaza.

The Tribunal heard that, on top of the death toll, at least 200,000 more have been injured; Gaza is now the home of the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. More than 80 per cent of the buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or destroyed, including 33 out of 36 hospitals. More than 95 per cent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable. At least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip have been displaced, with over a million Palestinians living in squalid tents without electricity, running water or a sewage system.

Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, told the Tribunal that Israel’s actions “could amount to a pattern of conduct deliberately inflicting [severe damage] on the group’s condition of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”

Britain’s responsibilities

The Tribunal took evidence on the UK’s responsibilities under international law and noted that the recent International Court of Justice ruling did not just order Israel to take specific actions to prevent irreparable harm to the Palestinian people. It also said that every state, including Britain, had a binding duty to prevent genocide. This obliges the UK to end arms sales, suspend intelligence-sharing, review its trade and investment ties and support humanitarian relief. It must “cooperate fully with international mechanisms of accountability, including the ICC and ICJ, and must investigate and potentially prosecute British citizens who either participated in or were complicit with the genocide.”

Far from fulfilling these obligations, the British government has been complicit and even actively participated in Israel’s crimes. It continues to arm the genocide, not only through F-35 parts but also through the transfer of armaments through UK airports. The RAF has conducted regular surveillance flights over Gaza and passed this intelligence to Israel. Israeli military officers have been allowed to train in Britain. Israeli officers here have been given special diplomatic immunity to protect them from private arrests.

Britain has facilitated Israel’s genocide in other ways. The Tribunal heard from Richard Burgon MP, who has consistently called for the UK government to ban all trade in goods and services with illegal Israeli settlements and impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and entities complicit in Israel’s occupation, in adherence with international law. “By maintaining military, diplomatic and economic support for Israel, Britain not only normalised genocide, but the apartheid state that was carrying it out,” report the authors.

Protests from Foreign Office officials

A Foreign Office civil servant who was the lead official on the UK arms export licensing report, which assessed whether Britain was legally compliant, resigned in protest over continued arms sales to Israel in August 2024. He told the Tribunal: “I was routinely asked to change the report… to omit key information so that it – quote unquote – sounded less bad. This is absolutely counter to what we are trained to do as civil servants.”

In May 2025, 310 Foreign Office officials wrote to the Foreign Secretary raising concerns about Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law and potential UK government complicity with these violations. The Government’s response was to offer the staff conversations with counsellors. Fran Heathcote, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, called this “a dereliction of duty.”

The Tribunal concluded that the British government has been complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed by Israel. Based on the evidence provided, it is reasonable to conclude that the British government may even have been an active participant in these crimes.

The destruction inflicted on Gaza is not some time-limited episode now receding into the past. Since the so-called ‘ceasefire’ began, Israel has killed over 750 people, blocked access to 37 humanitarian organisations and has expropriated 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip, concentrating over 2 million Palestinians in a narrow sliver of land, many in crowded camps with insufficient food and without electricity, running water or a sewage system. Meanwhile, Israel has extended its bombardments to Iran and Lebanon.

Prisoners’ plight

The scandalous plight of Palestinian prisoners also continues. Writing recently in the London Review of Books, Selma Dabbagh noted: “Israel has recently been added to a UN blacklist of countries that commit sexual violence in war zones. Prisoners are subjected not only to solitary confinement, starvation, scabies and overcrowding but to sexual assault and torture. The UN ‘verified multiple incidents’ last year.”

Andy Burnham issued an ‘apology’ over the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli genocide when he took over the Labour leadership. But this is “meaningless” unless it is followed by an end to arms sales to Israel, the Campaign Against Arms Trade says.

Last July, the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting texted his friend, the now disgraced Peter Mandelson: “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes.” Now he’s Andy Burnham’s new Defence Secretary, he is in an ideal position to do something about it. Will he?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.