Dossier accuses British serving in Israeli military of war crimes in Gaza
LONDON: A group of UK citizens who served with the Israeli military in Gaza will be the subject of a war crimes complaint handed to the Metropolitan Police, The Guardian reported on Monday.
A 240-page dossier compiled by a group of lawyers based in The Hague documents the activities of 10 Brits in Gaza, with complaints against them including alleged targeting of civilians and aid workers, coordinated attacks on hospitals and protected sites, and the forced displacement of people.
The dossier, which covers the period from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile, will be handed to the Met's war crimes unit.
The complaint against the 10 Brits, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will be brought on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the UK-based Public Interest Law Centre.
The dossier includes eyewitness testimony from civilians in Gaza. One passage features evidence from a witness who recalled an attack on a hospital, including seeing corpses 'scattered on the ground, especially in the middle of the hospital courtyard, where many dead bodies were buried in a mass grave.'
The account added that a bulldozer being used to demolish part of the hospital 'ran over a dead body in a horrific and heart-wrenching scene desecrating the dead.'
Raji Sourani, 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.'
PILC legal director Paul Heron said: 'We're filing our report to make clear these war crimes are not in our name.'
The 2001 International Criminal Court Act says 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.'
Michael Mansfield KC, the lawyer leading the group, 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 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.'
Sean Summerfield, a barrister who also worked on the dossier, said: '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.'
More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
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