The Crimes

“Shifa Hospital was not just bombed,” Dr Nick Maynard told the tribunal. “The Israeli military dismantled the whole infrastructure of the hospital.” Maynard, an Oxford University surgeon who has worked in Gaza since 2010, recalled how soldiers ransacked the building: cables to ultrasound machines were cut, dialysis machines destroyed, laboratories wrecked, and gas supplies removed. Doctors and nurses like Victoria Rose — a consultant plastic surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital in London — continued to work with the few resources that remained. “The screaming in the recovery room would not stop,” recalled Rose as she told of operating on children as young as eighteen months old without anaesthetic or antibiotics.

Maynard recounted treating a brother and sister, Ali and Aya, without any pain relief in al-Aqsa hospital. They were the sole surviving members of their family. Their parents and siblings had all been killed by a bomb that fell on their tent in al-Mawasi, a so-called “safe area.”

Attendees in Church House heard how many of Gaza’s injured children do not reach the operating room. Maynard recalled one young girl who died on the floor of al-Asqa’s emergency room from burns so severe that he could see her facial bones. This child was one of the more than 18,000 whom Israel has killed since October 2023 — taking an average of more than thirty young lives every day. Confirming the unique horror of the genocide, Dr Rose noted that the equivalent number for the Ukraine war is 0.5.

Eye-witness testimony like that of Rose and Maynard is exceedingly rare. Few doctors have been able to enter Gaza in recent months. Today, amid Israel’s complete blockade, between 60 to 90 percent of all physicians attempting to cross the border are denied entry to the besieged territory.

The forced starvation of Gaza has led to the rapid spread of preventable disease, added Dr Rose, who herself lost seven pounds during her twenty-eight-day visit to Gaza. In some patients, the resultant poor immunity has triggered Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune response through which the body mistakenly attacks its own peripheral nerves. Before October 2023, Gaza’s Ministry of Health had reported only two such cases per year. Last month, the World Health Organization recorded thirty-seven cases in children under age fifteen alone.

“We had to eat meat specified for animals and drink contaminated water,” Abubaker Abed, a young Palestinian journalist from Deir el-Balah, told the tribunal. Having reported from the ground in Gaza for eighteen months, Abed was forced to leave Palestine in April after receiving direct threats from the Israeli military. “The press vest in Gaza marks us as a target. It never protects us,” he said, grieving the 250 media workers killed since October 2023.

Before he left, Abed was one of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza — where 87 percent of the population is now crowded into 12 percent of the strip — to be diagnosed with severe malnutrition. At the same time, less than twenty miles away, thousands of humanitarian aid trucks sat idle at the border. To this day, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) retains six thousand trucks on standby, waiting to be allowed entry.

Juxtaposed with the abundance just beyond its walls, the forced starvation of Gaza offers us a mirror image of the wider world under imperialism, a wider world the Gaza Tribunal’s witnesses sought to expose. Concluding his contribution, Dr Maynard said: “It is unconscionable that F-35 jets, for which our government is still supplying parts, are bombing those very children whom I have had to operate on.”

British Participation

On September 2, 2024, Keir Starmer’s British government announced the limited suspension of thirty out of roughly three hundred and fifty arms licenses to Israel — but it carved out an exception for F-35 components. Later that day, it was revealed that the F-35 had been used two months earlier by the Israeli Air Force to drop three two-thousand-pound bombs on al-Mawasi, killing ninety people. This was just one of countless attacks involving the F-35, which has registered fifteen thousand operational flight hours over Gaza since October 2023.

As a “Tier 1” partner in the US-led F-35 construction program, Britain manufactures at least 15 percent of each warplane. This contribution involves at least seventy-five companies spanning the length and breadth of the country. Britian’s role in manufacturing the “genocide jet,” as one witness termed the F-35, places it at the heart of Israel’s war machine. After all, the F-35 is one of just three types of jet used over Gaza and, as Katie Fallon of the Campaign Against Arms Trade highlighted, the Israeli Air Force possesses only forty-five F-35s, with a further thirty on order.

The British state has resisted any and all efforts to halt the supply of F-35 components, citing “national security” concerns. Doing so would, according to Defense Secretary John Healey, “undermine US confidence in the UK and NATO at a critical juncture in our collective history and set back relations.” Bluntly, the tribunal heard how British ministers have ignored their obligations to comply with both international humanitarian law and domestic laws on arms export controls in order to appease Washington.

Britain, Church House heard, has also more directly aided Israel’s assault on the Palestinians. Investigative journalist Matt Kennard detailed how an Israeli refueling plane headed to Gaza from the United States stopped at the UK Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Brize Norton base before going on to help bomb dozens of civilians. “In October 2024, there was a massacre in Beit Lahiya,” said Kennard. “One of these refueling planes likely committed a war crime that killed seventy-three people — that plane had been in Britain four days before.”

The tribunal’s final witness, Tayab Ali, the Director of the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, was clear in his conclusion: “Every bomb that falls on Gaza carries with it the shadow of British complicity.”

The Cover-Up

The UK’s role in the genocide, however, extends beyond Israel’s air war. “Britain has had an eye over Gaza for much of this genocide,” explained Declassified UK’s John McEvoy. Al Jazeera recently established that Britain had conducted 47 percent of all surveillance flights over the Gaza Strip in the last twenty-three months, more than the Israeli state itself.

One such RAF reconnaissance flight was “very likely” to have recorded the killing of World Central Kitchen aid worker James Henderson in Gaza last April, reported Forz Khan, the lawyer acting for his family. Khan told the tribunal that he had asked repeatedly for the footage, but his requests were denied. While the British state is content to share intelligence with a state charged with genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it will not do so with the family of a murdered British citizen.

Perhaps this is because government ministers themselves have made no effort to review surveillance footage. McEvoy added that, during a session of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Foreign Office representatives confirmed that they had never requested the RAF’s reconnaissance recordings — a staggering admission given their legal obligations to determine whether Israel is complying with international humanitarian law.

The consequences of Britain’s daily participation in Israel’s crimes would be unimaginable, were they not the lived reality for the people of Gaza. Testifying via Zoom, Professor Raz Segal of Stockton University estimated that the genocide has claimed almost half a million lives — more than 20 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population. There is a consensus today, said Segal, that the UN’s official death count represents less than half of the real total. A more plausible estimate, therefore, is approximately 120,000. “There is also consensus that the ratio of indirect deaths to direct deaths in situations such as Gaza — due to famine, hunger, and disease — ranges from 3:1 to 15:1,” continued the genocide scholar.

Israel’s bombing of Gaza is the most intense assault on any area in the twenty-first century. “The ratio in this case is probably higher, rather than lower,” added Segal. However, even a conservative estimate concludes that, in addition to those 120,000 Palestinians Israel has killed directly, it has created the conditions for the painful death of 360,000 more.

In the British government, there has long been a concerted effort to ensure that these details are concealed from the public. Foreign Office whistleblower Mark Smith, who previously worked for the UK government in assessing the legality of the licensing of arms exports to Israel, was routinely asked to amend his reports so they “sounded less bad” — including by downplaying civilian deaths. “There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations on the most controversial aspects of our arms sales policy, which will never be seen by the public,” Smith told the tribunal.

That, of course, is why Corbyn’s initial demand for a full public inquiry into Britain’s role in Gaza was refused by Starmer’s government. To understand why, we need only think back to another recent warmongering Labour prime minister: Tony Blair. The Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq did not begin until 2009 — by which time the invasion’s chief architects had long since left Downing Street and escaped accountability.

In Church House, the UK government’s attempts to suffocate the reality of their crimes were exposed and dismantled. As Corbyn’s fellow panelist, Dr Hammouri, concluded: “The British state seems to have forgotten the facts of history: The truth of atrocity will come out.” The task before the hundreds of thousands of people who march for Palestine, one week after another, is to ensure that the truth revealed by the Gaza Tribunal is followed by justice.