One of UK’s leading human rights lawyers is set to submit a war crimes complaint to the Met Police against 10 Britons who served with the Israeli military in Gaza, reports the Guardian.
Michael Mansfield KC is one of a group of lawyers who will on Monday hand in a 240-page dossier to Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit alleging targeted killing of civilians and aid workers, including by sniper fire, and indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, including hospitals.
The report, which has been prepared by a team of UK lawyers and researchers in The Hague, also accuses suspects of coordinated attacks on protected sites including historic monuments and religious sites, and forced transfer and displacement of civilians.
For legal reasons, neither the names of suspects, who include officer-level individuals, nor the full report are being made public.
Israel has persistently denied that its political leaders or military have committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza, in which it has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians. The military campaign was in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people, also mostly civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken hostage.
Mansfield, who is known for his work on landmark cases such as the Grenfell Tower fire, Stephen Lawrence and the Birmingham Six, said: “If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries from behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.
“British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”
The report, which has been submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), covers alleged offences committed in the territory from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile.
Each of the crimes attributed to the 10 suspects, some of whom are dual nationals, amounts to a war crime or crime against humanity, according to the report.
One witness, who was at a medical facility, saw corpses “scattered on the ground, especially in the middle of the hospital courtyard, where many dead bodies were buried in a mass grave”. A bulldozer “ran over a dead body in a horrific and heart-wrenching scene desecrating the dead”, the witness said. They also said a bulldozer demolished part of the hospital.
Sean Summerfield, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who helped compile the dossier, said it was based on open-source evidence and witness testimony, which together presented a “compelling” case.
“The public will be shocked, I would have thought, to hear that there’s credible evidence that Brits have been directly involved in committing some of those atrocities,” he said, adding that the team wanted to see individuals “appearing at the Old Bailey to answer for atrocity crimes”.
The report says Britain has a responsibility under international treaties to investigate and prosecute those who have committed “core international crimes”.
Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001 states that it “is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against humanity, or a war crime”, even if it takes place in another country.
Raji Sourani, the director of the PCHR, said: “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.”
Paul Heron, the legal director of the PILC, said: “We’re filing our report to make clear these war crimes are not in our name.”
Scores of legal and human rights experts have signed a letter of support urging the war crimes team to investigate the complaints.
Bd-Pratidin English/ AM
