[Relevant documents: First Report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Israel-Palestine conflict, HC 488, and the Government response, HC 1374; Fifth Report of the International Development Committee, Protection not permission: The UK’s role in upholding international humanitarian law and supporting the safe delivery of humanitarian aid, HC 526; Second Report of the International Development Committee, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, HC 373.]
That this House has considered the obligation to assess the risk of genocide under international law in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and may I put on record my thanks to the Speaker’s Office for working so hard to ensure that we have time for the debate this afternoon? Given the pressure on time, and in order to allow as many Back-Bench speeches as possible, I will not take any interventions.
In his book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”, the Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad wrote:
“The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: 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.”
That question will have to be answered. That may not be today or even this year, but at some point all of us, particularly those who hold positions of power or have a public platform, will have to answer that fundamental question: which side were we on? Were we on the side of justice, or did we side with the powerful?
When asked, each of us will have to answer: did we speak up for the tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children who were killed; did we use our platform to actively oppose the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians from their homes and communities as they were reduced to rubble, and condemn unequivocally the collective punishment imposed on an entire population when the basics necessary to sustain life—water, electricity, food and medicine—were deliberately withheld from them; or did we, either by what we said and did, or by what we did not say and did not do, side with the powerful, look away because it was in our political or financial interests so to do, and give political cover and legitimacy to the Netanyahu regime as it carried out its genocide while our Government supplied it with the weapons and military intelligence to do so?
The Hamas attack of 7 October was utterly appalling, and no right-thinking person could excuse or condone what happened that day. Neither, however, could any right-thinking person excuse or condone the Israeli response, which has been not just disproportionate, but brutal and relentless. Israel’s response has been carried out in such a systematic manner that, in my opinion, no reasonable person could deny that what we have witnessed in Gaza over the past two and a half years constitutes genocide.
The Government have denied, and continue to this day to deny, that it is a genocide. It is a decision that the Government will have to explain, and with which they will have to live. Today, however, I am not here to play ping-pong with the Government on the legal definition of what does and does not constitute genocide.
I thank the hon. Member for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O’Hara) for bringing forward this most important debate.
This is a debate on an obligation to assess the risk of genocide. Who could disagree with that? There has been a terrible war in Gaza, and although there is a ceasefire, loss of life continues. It was sparked by the 7 October attack in 2023 and the taking of the hostages, which was the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. This was not a war of Israel’s seeking. The aims of the war were to secure the release of the hostages and to prevent Hamas from ever repeating their attack, which they had promised to do on many occasions. As the Chief Rabbi said,
“If Hamas lays down its arms there will be no fighting… If Israel were to lay down its arms there would be no Israel.”
Genocide is a legal description of the intentional, systematic destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as defined by the 1948 UN genocide convention. The concept was defined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer from Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg—much in the news—in the aftermath of the war. I first heard of Lemkin in the marvellous book “East West Street” by Philippe Sands, who will deliver tonight the Alf Dubs lecture in Battersea.
“Intent” is the crucial word. Britain and its allies are not accused of genocide for the strategic bombing of Germany, despite the hundreds of thousands who were killed. It is a matter for a court to decide on genocide, and despite the many debates about it in this Chamber, we can all agree that this is not a court.
We know that there has been massive loss of life and destruction in Gaza, but I simply cannot believe that it was the stated intention of the Government of Israel to completely destroy the population of Gaza. We do not have any means of independently verifying anything, since we are left to rely on news from the Hamas-led Health Ministry and the Israel Government’s spokespeople. I directly asked the President of Israel, Mr Herzog, twice about allowing in independent journalists, such as those from CNN or the BBC, and I was twice informed that it was too dangerous. Is that still the case? I doubt it now that there is a ceasefire.
We are witnessing in Gaza a catastrophe that was not only foreseeable but preventable. For over two years, the UK Government have hidden behind legal sleight of hand while a genocide has unfolded in Gaza. The definition of genocide set out in article II of the genocide convention is precise. It involves specific acts
“committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
First, article II(a) prohibits killing members of such a group. As of January of this year, 71,500 Palestinians have been killed, including 570 aid workers and 1,700 health workers. That is not collateral damage; it is the destruction of a people and it is sickening.
Just yesterday, during the current supposed ceasefire, the BBC reported that at least 20 Palestinians, including several children and a paramedic, had been killed and almost 40 others wounded in Israeli strikes in Gaza, according to hospitals in Palestine. The response from the Israel Defence Forces stated that they had carried out “precise strikes”—so precise, apparently, that they had to further state,
“The IDF is aware of the claim that several uninvolved civilians, including a medical staff member, were hit in the strike.”
That is a familiar trope that they have used throughout the conflict. If those were the reactions of our own military, the standards we would apply in investigation and response would be rigorous and likely lead to court martial because it is not even close to our, rightly, highly robust rules of engagement rooted in moral integrity.
Secondly, article II(b) prohibits
“Causing serious bodily or mental harm”.
We know that over 143,000 people have been injured, with many maimed for life, and the population has been subjected to torture and arbitrary detention. Thirdly, and perhaps most damningly, article II(c) prohibits
I am honoured to serve as co-chair of the Britain-Palestine all-party parliamentary group.
We face a stark legal reality: the UK’s duty to prevent genocide is triggered the moment a serious risk becomes evident. The International Court of Justice made that clear in January 2024. Judge Joan Donoghue stated that the Court found
“a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention.”
The Court issued provisional measures directing Israel to prevent genocide—measures that Israel has ignored.
Words matter too. Israel’s President Herzog declared,
“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.”
Under international law, such statements are evidence of intent. The UN commission of inquiry confirmed that the ICJ’s provisional measures placed all state parties on notice of a serious risk of genocide in Gaza, triggering legal obligations on third states, including the UK. As its chair, Navi Pillay, stated,
“Israel has flagrantly disregarded the orders for provisional measures from the International Court of Justice…and continued the strategy of destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Yet in September 2024, UK Government lawyers concluded that there was no serious risk of genocide occurring. That defies the Court, the commission and the law.
The UK itself has argued that genocide is not limited to killings, but includes forced displacement, serious bodily or mental harm and deprivation of food, particularly when children are targeted. Despite that, the UK has failed to acknowledge the risk, failed to respond to the ICJ or the commission and failed to act as it has elsewhere. I ask the Minister what evidence would be required to accept the risk of genocide if neither the ICJ nor the UN commission of inquiry suffices, and why, when the UK has argued that acts against children and forced displacement are indicators of genocidal intent, it has not applied that standard here.
All of us are here in this Chamber because of the horror we have at the events of 7 October, and the atrocities that have taken place thereafter and that continue to take place. Many of us are also here because of a profound sense of shame—shame at the way the last Government and this Government have conducted themselves throughout this entire affair. Among the many shames that we will all have to bear is the Government’s reluctance to vigorously and assertively participate in the international rules-based order which we built to prevent exactly this kind of eventuality.
As other Members have said, I do not understand what the Government think the ICJ was doing when it ruled that there was a plausible case for genocide. Did they not think that it was triggering exactly the obligations that other Members have mentioned? Those obligations are not rhetorical; they are operational, real, obligatory. We have to act to prevent; we cannot facilitate. Yet time and again, the British Government have done absolutely nothing. From arms to intelligence sharing and diplomatic cover, we have continued as normal.
I am left wondering what it is this country stands for, because it is not just on this obligation that there has been nothing. On the torture convention, even when the reputable Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has just published a report saying that Israel is running
“a network of torture camps”,
there has been nothing from the British Government, notwithstanding their international obligations. On the settlements in the west bank, a hundred parliamentarians wrote to the Government and the ICJ has ruled, yet the Government have done the bare minimum they could get away with to enforce those obligations. There are even the individual cases we have seen on our telephones and on social media: Dr Adnan al-Bursh tortured to death; Hind Rajab, who the world heard as she lay dying in a car, left alone at the age of six; the ambulances ambushed; the hospitals flattened; the schools crushed. Even when British citizens are slaughtered—surely we have an obligation to them if we do not feel that we have one to anybody else—the Government have done nothing. This is a monstrous abdication of duty.
We have seen UK recognition of Palestine become a reality and a Gaza ceasefire under Labour, but still 70,000 Palestinians have been killed—a figure now accepted by Israel—including 500 people since the ceasefire. We have seen repeated forcible displacement and whole neighbourhoods gone. Is this genocide, like Srebrenica and Rwanda? The ICJ will take years to determine that, but the UN commission of inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars say yes. How does Joe Public decide? With 37 non-governmental organisations, including Oxfam, effectively banned and international media excluded, the external mechanisms that should help us make that assessment are gone. Targeted measures are rendering it impossible to judge. The civilian/combatant line is blurred given the deaths of women and children, making the IDF claim that it always minimises casualties questionable.
The very risk of genocide raises Britain’s obligations under the 1948 convention to prevent genocide or risk complicity.
Although we have allowed children to travel to the UK from Gaza for medical care, and allowed students in, we have also seen Gazan hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, universities and refugee camps destroyed. That biblical devastation is man-made.
We are here to discuss genocide. As my hon. Friend says, 20,000 children have been killed, 95% of hospitals have been destroyed, and food has been blocked to the point of famine. Does she agree that the House of Commons—and, indeed, the world—cannot stand by and let that happen?
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. He used to work for Save the Children, which has also been de-registered—the shame of it. We must act.
There has been a systematic discrediting of the UN. United Nations Relief and Works Agency buildings have been destroyed, and Francesca Albanese has been accused of being a witch and sanctioned by the US. And what has been proposed in place of the UN? The Gaza board of peace, headed by Donald Trump, which costs $1 billion to join. The board has zero Palestinian representation, but Putin, the President’s son-in-law and Netanyahu all have seats, and its founding charter does not mention Gaza. The UK must not give that vanity project any credence.
Extremist Israeli Ministers have been sanctioned and 30 arms licences suspended, but, as the facts worsen on the ground, we must ramp up our support for real peace efforts, as opposed to grubby real estate deals that are void of international law and bypass Palestinians. Even the ceasefire negotiators were bombed in Qatar. Of course, the acts of Hamas on 7 October must be condemned, but Netanyahu’s war cabinet has since gone way beyond self-defence. Starvation, and the erasure of the international presence to gather evidence on what might or might not be a genocide, must set off alarm bells and requires urgent action for us to be on the right side of history. We must say no to the board of peace. We need a toughened sanctions package and arms embargo, and a full ban on trade in settlement goods—not just the present situation of tariff reductions.
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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.