Lawyers seeking arms export ban to Israel alleging war crime in Gaza by submitting claims to UK court

Law firms have filed complaints with the High Court in London for horrors and inhuman treatment, including the torture of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, being denied medical attention and being subjected to continuous bombing. These claims are made in an application before the English court in support of an application for an injunction to restrain the UK government from issuing further export licenses to British companies for the export of arms to Israel. 

 The overall evidence comprises 14 accounts running over 100 pages and includes statements from Arabic and European doctors, ambulance drivers, members of the civil defence, and first aid responders. Through the detailed accounts, the attempt is to show that the UK government’s failure to embargo arms exports to Israel only makes little sense for the UK since there is a very real possibility that such weapons may be employed to breach IHRL. 

 While identifiable to the court, the witness accounts are mostly camouflaged to spare the families in Gaza from criminal retribution. There are two of them: one is public because this person’s life was threatened, and the other remains anonymous because they were threatened too. The judicial review, which is set for 8-10 October, will be a precedent in that explicit proofs of Israeli violence are to be brought before a British judge for the first time since Hamas attacked Israel on 7th October, over 1,100 Israeli people were killed and 250 hostages were taken. 

 The case has been initiated by the NGO Coalition for Ecological and Economic Justice, which consists of Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Human Rights Watch. These organisations are protesting against the earlier conservative government’s decision to go on issuing export licences for arms to Israel, claiming there was not enough risk that UK weapons would be used in war crimes. 

 IDF has argued that it has the right to self-defence and that Operation Cast Lead had complied with humanitarian law; concerning alleged and documented misconduct, the Israeli military said that different investigating authorities deal with these. 

One of them, Dr. Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, said he was treating a patient who needed a skin graft due to being forced to stand for 48 hours. He also told of another of his patients, a 60-year-old man who had been disrobed and strapped and left in that position for three days, being dragged on the floor. His spine had fared badly. 

 Dr Thomson, in his interview, highlighted that Gaza is in a very helpless position; the health sector is virtually defunct now, and people are dying from easily curable diseases. He gave details of carrying out operations on children and admitted that he didn’t have the necessary equipment to do so properly or the medicines he required. He also painted a detailed picture of the hospital where a man was stretched on the floor and left to die, covered in his own blood and brain matter. 

 Another witness, Dr Khaled Dawas, a consultant surgeon at the University College Hospital London, was shocked at the rate at which health facilities in Gaza were degraded and compared with medieval medicine. He said most of his patients were snipers, and he dismissed the argument regarding the availability of hostiles in hospitals that Israel levelled against them, stressing that in four weeks of serving at Al Aqsa Hospital, he never saw any. 

 He has also detailed a man with a disability who was handcuffed, blindfolded and chained to his wheelchair for 30 days of detention. 

 The third consultant, another unnamed Briton, spoke of being bombed with a group of doctors in a “safe house”, and NGOs withdrew humanitarian staff from the area. Contrary to British diplomats in Cairo who promised the case would be resolved at the highest level, the medical team was said to have had no communication with the UK government. 

 Charlotte Andrews–Briscoe, the GLAN’s legal representative and counsel for compiling the witness statements, provided some challenges, including an influx of cases of mistreatment and abuse.