Occupied Palestinian Territories: Genocide Risk Assessment

Instead, I want to focus on the mountain of evidence that says there is at least a serious risk of genocide occurring, and that serious risk should have triggered the UK’s legal obligation to act under the terms of the genocide convention, as explained by the International Court of Justice in its 2007 Bosnia ruling—an obligation that comes into effect long before any determination of genocide has been made by a court. The standard of serious risk is designed to be an early warning that ensures that states and international bodies act to prevent a genocide from occurring. In the case of the Palestinian people of Gaza, the UK has clearly and undeniably failed abjectly to meet its legal responsibility when alerted to there being a serious risk of genocide.

When the UK signed the genocide convention in 1948, it promised to prevent and punish this most heinous of crimes. Now, with more 71,000 people dead and 200,000 people injured, Gaza reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland, its population in the grip of a man-made famine and its medical infrastructure obliterated, hundreds of journalists murdered, water and electricity used as a means of coercion and punishment, food and medicine denied to the starving and the dying and the repeated forced displacement of millions of civilians, it is surely beyond any dispute that the minimum requirement for the UK to act to prevent and punish the crime of genocide has been met.

Arguably the most damning indictment, however, is that more than 21,000 children have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces since October 2023. Let us not forget that in November 2023 the UK Government formally intervened in the case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar at the ICJ to argue for changes to the definition of genocide that included lowering the threshold when damage was inflicted on children. If it is appropriate for the UK to intervene to protect children from the bombs and bullets of the Myanmar military, why is it not appropriate for it to intervene to protect Palestinian children from the bombs and bullets of the IDF?

Of course, genocide is not and never has been about numbers. The numbers killed, while shocking, do not in and of themselves necessarily prove genocide; there are other methods, including

“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

That is why it is important that we look at what else has happened in Gaza since October 2023. Over the past two and a half years, Israel has obliterated the agricultural sector; the fishing industry has gone; the road network has been wrecked; agricultural wells have been demolished; most crop land and greenhouses have been rendered unusable; the vast majority of livestock have been killed; and the vitally important and culturally significant olive tree crops have been targeted and destroyed.

Such is the devastation that a Guardian journalist on board a Jordanian air force plane wrote:

“Seen from the air, Gaza looks like the ruins of an ancient civilisation.”

And he added that Gaza was razed by an Israeli military campaign that has left behind a place that looks like the aftermath of an apocalypse. That does not happen by accident, and it is impossible to view this as anything other than a premeditated attempt to erase Palestinians from their land by making it impossible for human life to survive.

By any measure, collectively, all of that constitutes unimpeachable evidence that there has been a serious risk of genocide. And that should have triggered a UK Government response to prevent that becoming a full-blown genocide, but is has not. It is not as if the Government can say that they did not know or that they were unaware, because, time and again, statements made from that Dispatch Box, including from the former Foreign Secretary and the current Prime Minister, have conceded that they knew exactly what was happening, but they have chosen to do nothing about it. They have accepted and have publicly condemned the siege tactics, the denial of humanitarian assistance, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the use of evacuation orders, the denial of water, food and electricity, the targeting of journalists, the destruction of healthcare, the astronomical number of civilian casualties, and the deliberate dehumanising of the Palestinian people.

In their own words, the Government have denied undeniable proof that war crimes are being carried out, that mass atrocities are being carried out, and that civilians are being denied the basics to maintain life. A quick trawl of Hansard will reveal that as far back as January 2024, the then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), said that

“85% of the population are displaced and millions face the risk of famine.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2024; Vol. 744, c. 622.]

Two months later he said that

“famine in Gaza is imminent... but what distinguishes the horror in Gaza from what has come before is that is it not driven by drought or natural disaster; it is man-made.”—[Official Report, 19 March 2024; Vol. 747, c. 806.]

And in May 2024 he said that

“aid is reportedly being blocked and northern Gaza is now in full blown famine”.—[Official Report, 7 May 2024; Vol. 749, c. 443.]

A year later, in May of 2025, he openly acknowledged Israeli war crimes against the civilian population when he said:

“The whole House should be able to utterly condemn the Israeli Government’s denial of food to hungry children. It is wrong. It is appalling.”—[Official Report, 20 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 927.]

And then he continued that

“what we are seeing is inhumane, it is deadly and it is depriving Gazans of their human dignity.—[Official Report, 21 July 2025; Vol. 771, c. 662.]

It is there in black and white. The Government have acknowledged it. And the Prime Minister, when he was Leader of the Opposition in October of 2023, acknowledged that serious risk, saying:

“Civilians must not be targeted. Where Palestinians are forced to flee, they must not be permanently displaced… International law is clear. It also means that basic services, including water, electricity and the fuel needed for it, cannot be denied.—[Official Report, 23 October 2023; Vol. 738, c. 593.]

And as Prime Minister he said:

“We continue to see mounting evidence of appalling atrocities against civilians and unacceptable restrictions on humanitarian access.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 806.]

There are so many more examples of the Prime Minister, the former Foreign Secretary and other Ministers admitting from that Dispatch Box that Israel was using food as a weapon of war, that it had manufactured a famine, that it was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, that it was committing war crimes, and that it was stripping Gazans of their human dignity. Yet it remains the official position of the UK Government that none of that—none of it—meets the threshold for there being a serious risk of genocide.

I ask the Minister whether we are being asked to believe that, even when the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.

Did that not trigger within the Government the thought that perhaps there was a serious risk of genocide? Finance Minister Smotrich said:

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed; civilians will be sent to...the south…and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”

Did that not trigger the thought that, perhaps, there was a potential risk of genocide occurring? The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said:

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”.

Did that not suggest to the UK Government that perhaps Israel’s response to the atrocities of 7 October was going to be disproportionate, brutal and illegal; and that continuing to sell weapons and maintaining a “business as usual” relationship with Tel Aviv might put us in grave danger of breaching our obligations under the genocide convention?

Despite Israel making its intentions unambiguously clear from the very start—that it was going to ethnically cleanse Gaza, would do so using whatever means necessarily and would do so indiscriminately—it appears that the UK Government made the political choice to deliberately ignore their obligations so that they could continue a business-as-usual relationship with Netanyahu’s Government.

I will finish where I began, with that powerful quote from Omar El Akkad:

“When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

This UK Government and the Government who preceded them have chosen to side with power over justice, and history will judge them accordingly.

The word “genocide” has been used to rally protest all over the world, but we have seen where some of that has led. If we allow this most significant of words to be bandied about with such certainty, do we not risk undermining the words that are needed to describe the Holocaust, which was the intentional and systematic murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazis; the Rohingya being expelled en masse, raped and slaughtered; the Uyghurs being subjected to mass internment, forced sterilisation and cultural erasure; or the mass murders in Rwanda?

Genocide is a quite specific crime, and frankly it is not my belief that this was the intent of the Israel Defence Forces. But I do agree that there is an obligation for this to be assessed.

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction”.

Amnesty International has found that Israel has systematically destroyed life-sustaining infrastructure, including water, sanitation and energy grids. By creating a so-called buffer zone, Israel has razed 59% of agricultural land in that area and, as of last month, 81% of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, and all the while it has severely restricted vital aid and supplies. This is the deliberate erasure of the means of survival, which has led to widely reported and verifiable famine.

When Israeli leaders describe Palestinians as “human animals” and speak of “flattening Gaza”, and then proceed to destroy 19 hospitals and block essential aid, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is the “intent to destroy” the group, as per the definition. Even now, despite the UN commission of inquiry finding in September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide and Amnesty International confirming that the genocide continues despite the October ceasefire, the UK refuses to act.

History will judge this Government and this Parliament for their—

History will judge whether we acted when the warning signs were crystal clear. I urge the Government to acknowledge the risk and meet their legal duty to prevent genocide.

In this regard, the law is not unclear. The facts are not hidden. Daily, we hear Israeli Ministers boasting about what is being done in Gaza. What is missing is political will. It is about time that the Minister and his superiors realised that history does not just judge what Governments do; it judges what they allow.