A war crimes complaint against 10 Britons who served with the Israeli military in Gaza is to be submitted to the Met police by one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers.
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 civilian, 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 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.
Hellbound and Down 