Jeremy Corbyn will open a two-day public tribunal into alleged British complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza on Thursday, at which former diplomats, UN specialists and international law academics will examine the Foreign Office’s handling of the crisis.
The tribunal is being jointly chaired by the former Labour leader and is the kind of political initiative that will be a thorn in Keir Starmer’s side as his party seeks to retain the backing of leftwing and Muslim voters at the next election.
The tribunal, which will be livestreamed from London, has been framed to look at what has happened in Gaza over the past two years, Britain’s legal responsibilities, any evidence of British covert support for Israel, and whether the government’s actions match any legal obligations to prevent a genocide.
A former Foreign Office whistleblower, Mark Smith, will give evidence, as well as the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese.
Other witnesses will be a lawyer for the family of Jim Henderson, a World Food Kitchen aid worker killed on 1 April 2024; Prof Nick Maynard, an Oxford University surgeon who has been given a humanitarian award for his work in Gaza; and Palestinian journalists including Abubaker Abed and Yousef Alhelou.
An Israeli historian, Dr Raz Segal, has been asked to explain why many scholars regard Israel’s handling of Gaza and the West Bank as “a textbook case of genocide”, a view he took in late 2023.
UK ministers have defended their stance on Gaza, saying they rapidly imposed a ban on all arms sales to Israel, except for F-35 parts that were sold on to Israel, suspended talks on a new partnership agreement and imposed sanctions on two ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
One of the points of the inquiry will be the degree to which RAF surveillance planes have slipped from looking for hostages held by Hamas into aiding the wider Israeli military campaign inside Gaza. It may also look at the intersection between the Ministry of Defence and the Israeli arms industry.
Separately, Dr Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, speaking at the Chatham House thinktank on Tuesday, said a de facto annexation of the West Bank was happening and the UK should ban the import of all products from illegal settlements in Palestine.
He said a long list of settler products being imported into the UK had been provided to the Foreign Office. “Be real, don’t be half-committed and don’t zigzag and dance around the issues. Illegalities must be marked,” he said.
Zomlot also called for UK visa waivers to be withdrawn from Israeli settlers living illegally in the West Bank and any UK dual citizens serving in the Israeli army.
He welcomed the UK steps taken so far but described “most of them as half measures not designed to create real leverage”. He said: “The UK had a legal obligation to stop the genocide in Gaza, to stop the annexation and to recognise the state of Palestine.”
The UK plans to recognise a Palestinian state at a UN conference in New York on 22 September.
Along with Corbyn, the Gaza tribunal is chaired by Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London and vice-president of the British Society for Middle East Studies, and Dr Shahd Hammouri, a lecturer in international law at Kent University.
Tribunal organisers say they hope their unofficial and necessarily limited inquiry will stir public demands for an official state-funded inquiry into the British government’s handling of the Gaza crisis under Labour and the Conservatives.
The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has described the west’s handling of the Gaza crisis as the darkest moment in diplomacy in the 21st century, but there is little UK government appetite to review the lessons of that failure.
