Ten British nationals who served in the Israeli military in Gaza have been accused of war crimes in a complaint submitted to the Met Police.
Leading human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield KC is part a group of lawyers and human rights activists who have handed a 240-page dossier to Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit, accusing the Britons of targeting and killing civilians and aid workers, including through sniper fire, as well as carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilian sites, such as hospitals.
Here, The i Paper looks at everything we know about the case and who is involved.
The names of the British nationals who served with the Israeli military have not been made public for legal reasons.
However, it is understood that some of the individuals are officer-level personnel and some of them are duel British-Israeli nationals.
“If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it,” Mansfield said before the dossier was submitted to police. “Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.”
Mansfield has represented survivors and bereaved relatives of the Grenfell Tower fire, as well as the family of Stephen Lawrence. The barrister also played a key role in the case of the Birmingham Six, a group of men wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings who later had their convictions quashed.
What are the allegations?
The report accuses the ten Britons of targeting and killing civilians and aid workers, carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, and the forced transfer and displacement of civilians.
It includes allegations from people at a medical facility in Gaza who claim to have witnessed corpses “scattered on the ground” and “many dead bodies… buried in a mass grave”.
The individuals are also accused of coordinated attacks on protected cultural sites, including historic monuments and religious sites.
The local civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 44 people in the Gaza Strip on April 6, one of them hitting a residential building in Deir al-Balah, killing several people, including women and children, according to witnesses (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP)Israel has repeatedly denied allegations that its political leaders or military have committed war crimes during the offensive in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health are seen as reliable by the United Nations (UN) and international institutions. Israel has consistently disputed data published by Gaza’s authorities.
The report was prepared by a team of UK lawyers and researchers in The Hague and submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC).
A number of legal and human rights experts have signed a letter of support urging the UK’s war crimes team to investigate the complaints.
The report details alleged crimes attributed to each individual that amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.
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“These incidents are of course just the tip of the iceberg. Our submission to the Metropolitan Police therefore calls for the urgent commencement of an investigation into those British nationals,” said Paul Heron, PILC Legal Director and founder.
“I am confident that the Metropolitan Police and the war crimes team will take it seriously,” he said.
“We’ve met with them, and they do seem to be very keen to investigate the matter further. And we just hope that there’s no political interference into their investigations.”
The report alleges the crimes were committed on the territory of Gaza over the course of six months, from October 2023 to May 2024.
“This is illegal, this is inhuman and enough is enough. The government cannot say we didn’t know; we are providing them with all the evidence,” Raji Sourani, the director of the PCHR, has said.
What does the law say?
The authors of the report say that Britain has a responsibility under international treaties to investigate and prosecute those who have committed the crimes alleged in the dossier.
Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act (ICCA) 2001 stipulates that committing genocide, a crime against humanity, or a war crime is an offence under the law of England and Wales, regardless of whether the crime occurs in another country.
The report’s authors say that their findings provide substantial evidence for the Met’s war crimes team to initiate an investigation into the ten named suspects under the ICCA and the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 (GCA), which criminalises “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions – a series of international treaties that establish legal standards for the humane treatment of individuals during armed conflict.
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