Published March 20261
© Peace & Justice Project 2026
This report may be reproduced, distributed, or quoted from in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes, provided that full credit is given to the Peace & Justice Project.
Published by Peace & Justice Project
The Gaza Tribunal is an inquiry examining Britain’s role in Israeli war crimes on Gaza.
Printed in the United Kingdom.
RT. HON. JEREMY CORBYN
MP DR. SHAHD HAMMOURI
PROF. NEVE GORDON
“The people of Britain deserve the truth. The people of Palestine deserve justice. And history will judge harshly those who have stood by or, worse, armed and enabled and shielded a genocide. The Tribunal is therefore not only an act of truth-telling, it’s an act of accountability in the face of Britain’s profound legal and moral failure.”
TAYAB ALI
“Members of the Tribunal, the UK is clearly in breach of its obligations under international law, choosing instead to protect its arms industry, its shipping interests, its political alliances over the lives of Palestinians and its commitments under international law.”
GUILLAUME LONG
CONTENTS
Foreword Executive Summary
Part I: What has happened in Gaza?
Part II: What are Britain’s legal responsibilities?
Part III: What has Britain’s role been in Gaza?
Part IV: Has Britain fulfilled its legal obligations?
FOREWORD JEREMY CORBYN MP
On July 13, 2024, Israel bombed the al-Mawasi camp in southern Gaza. A designated “safe-zone,” al-Mawasi was home to 80,000 people who were trying to flee from bombardment. The airstrikes killed more than ninety Palestinians.
It would take Britain’s Labour government another six weeks to impose any arms restrictions on Israel at all. By that time, at least 41,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, including 11,000 children. More than 96,000 people had been injured. Two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza had been destroyed. Eight months before the government’s announcement, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that a plausible genocide was taking place and set into motion the obligation of all parties—including the UK—to prevent it.
When the government announced it was suspending around thirty arms export licences to Israel, this was not the end of British complicity. It was the beginning of a new campaign of lies, evasion and obfuscation. Suspending around thirty arms export licences out of a total of 350, the government made one, huge, glaring omission: the continued supply of parts for Israel’s F-35 jets. This included components that went to the United States to be sent on to Israel, and spare parts that went into the global stockpiles that may then go to Israel.
Approximately 15 percent of every F-35 aircraft that is produced is made in the UK. The rear fuselage is made in Lancaster; the active interceptor system in Kent; durability testing in East Yorkshire; the ejector seats in Buckinghamshire; the weapons release mechanisms in Brighton. On the very same day that the Foreign Secretary announced the partial suspension, a report found that an F-35 was used to drop three 2,000-pound bombs in the al-Mawasi massacre.
In June 2025, I presented a Private Members’ Bill to Parliament, calling for an independent, public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in Gaza. I wanted to know: what weapons have been supplied? Which of those weapons have been used in Gaza? What is RAF Akrotiri airbase being used for? What legal advice has the Government received regarding its assessment of genocide?
What other political and diplomatic support has Britain provided to Israel, a nation whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC)?
The Bill had the support of more than fifty MPs, alongside numerous human rights organisations. So, what did the government do? They blocked it. They even went to the trouble of writing me a letter, explaining that “there is no need for an inquiry.” The government told me: “such an inquiry would be unnecessary as there is no confusion about UK military operations in Gaza.” To most people, however, it is quite simple: if the government had nothing to hide, it wouldn’t need to block our efforts to expose the truth.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, several attempts were made to establish an inquiry surrounding the conduct of British military operations. The government of the day spent many years resisting those attempts. They could not prevent the inevitable, and in 2016 Sir John Chilcot published his report. The report found serious failings within the British Government, who ignored the warnings of millions of ordinary people who opposed the invasion. Just like Iraq, the government is doing everything it can to protect itself from scrutiny. Just like Iraq, we do not need the government’s permission to expose the truth.
That is why we hosted the Gaza Tribunal: to uncover the full scale of Britain’s complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The Tribunal was split into four sections addressing the following questions: What happened in Gaza? What are Britain’s legal obligations? What has Britain done? Has Britain fulfilled its legal obligations?
Over the course of two days in Church House, Westminster, Dr Shahd Hammouri, Professor Neve Gordon and I heard from a range of witnesses, whistleblowers and experts. I want to take this opportunity to thank the witnesses for their powerful testimonies, as well as Shahd and Neve for their incredible work and the great friendship we have developed.
We heard from international legal experts and UN officials, who outlined a range of legal obligations compelling Britain to prevent genocide and bring to an end Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
We heard from Palestinians and journalists who have survived the genocide, who spoke for themselves about the atrocities that many of us have witnessed on our computers and phones. We also heard from healthcare workers who treated victims of the al-Mawasi massacre. “I still hear their screams as we treated them without any anaesthetic,” Dr Nick Maynard recalled, referring to Ali and Aya, brother and sister, the sole remaining members of their family.
And we heard from human rights campaigners and whistleblowers who uncovered Britain’s complicity in this horror. That included a senior civil servant who described how he and his colleagues would be asked to amend their reports on Gaza to “make the situation [appear] less bad.” The damning testimonies of our witnesses proved beyond doubt the following: Britain has systematically failed to meet its legal obligations to prevent genocide.
As the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 said, “Palestine today is a crime scene.” This report is not an exhaustive investigation into these crimes. Not least because these crimes continued long after the Tribunal concluded. Indeed, the day after our Tribunal ended, at least sixty-eight Palestinians were killed and 362 others were injured in Israeli attacks. A two-day Tribunal cannot possibly uncover the full scope and scale of suffering that Palestinians have endured, nor the full scope and scale of British complicity. To this day, we are still denied access to crucial information that the public deserves to know.
That is why I will continue to push for a full, official, independent public inquiry. One that conducts an investigation into any co-operation between the UK and Israel since October 2023. One with the power to question ministers and officials involved in decision-making processes. One that enforces a statutory duty of candour on public officials to tell the truth. The Government may have thought that, with this Tribunal, we would stop. It is gravely mistaken. This Tribunal is not a substitute for an independent inquiry. Far from it. This Tribunal, and the evidence it has collated, means the case for an independent inquiry is stronger than ever before.
In writing this report, we hope the Gaza Tribunal serves as a landmark contribution to the campaign for justice, and as a historical repository of evidence for generations to come. We know this report will not be able to bring about justice by itself—and it cannot do the work that must be done by domestic and international legal institutions. That is why we will work with these institutions, including the ICC, to draw their attention to violations of international law. That includes evidence implicating government ministers and officials. The truth is out—and we will bring about justice for the Palestinian people.
Words cannot begin to describe the level of suffering that Palestinians have endured. We have all seen the images. Human beings torn to pieces. People getting shot as they queue for a bag of flour. Entire neighbourhoods flattened. Mothers screaming for their children buried under the rubble. This was no war aiming at defeating a military opponent. This was a genocide aimed at destroying an entire people—aided and abetted by the British government.
The horrific experience of the last two years, on top of the decades of occupation the Palestinian people have endured, have shown us just how weak international law has become, and how the much-vaunted rules-based order is being buried under the rubble along with the Palestinian lives it has failed to protect. If impunity rules the world, then we all face a very grim future. Our Tribunal, yes, is speaking up for the people of Palestine, but it is also speaking up for a world in which everybody—no matter their ethnicity, race or religion—can live in dignity and peace.
Today, schoolchildren are taught about history’s worst crimes against humanity. They are asked to reflect on how these crimes possibly could have occurred. And they learn the names of political figures that endorsed or enabled such atrocities. In the near future, our history books will shame those in our government who could have stopped the genocide in Gaza but facilitated it instead. This report will help cement the government’s legacy as an active participant in one of the greatest crimes of our time.
Mass starvation cannot happen in a world where Palestinians are treated as equal human beings. Genocide cannot happen in a world where Palestinian lives matter. Apartheid cannot happen in a world where Palestinians have an inalienable right to self-determination. Our role—our duty—is to give solidarity and support to the people of Palestine living under occupation and to defend their right to live in freedom, justice and peace. I don’t know what the future holds any more than anybody else does, but I do know that it is up to the Palestinian people to decide their own future.
Palestinian solidarity did not begin with the genocide in Gaza. Likewise, it cannot end with the announcement of a sham ceasefire. As Israel continues to murder, dispossess, coerce, and deny Palestinians the means to live a dignified life in their homeland, it has never been more important to mobilise for Palestinian liberation. That includes Palestinian self-determination. That includes the right of return. That includes reparations for historic crimes. And that includes justice for the Palestinian people. The genocide never ended. Neither, then, can our solidarity with a people yearning to survive.
I have visited Palestine on several occasions. Each time, I am in awe of the resilience of a people under siege. We are presented with a view of the Palestinian people as being in a hopeless position. They’re not. Their determination, their cultural strength, their community spirit, and their belief in the cause of Palestine outweighs all of that. The life of Palestinian people is unbelievably harsh and brutal, but we should find inspiration in their enduring strength, resilience and joy. Many ask me why we keep demonstrating in the face of an establishment that refuses to listen. We only need one reason: Palestinians are human beings just like you and me. Surely that is enough to keep campaigning for their right to live in freedom, dignity and peace.
Jeremy Corbyn MP
A MESSAGE OF THANKS FROM JEREMY CORBYN, SHAHD HAMMOURI AND NEVE GORDON
Thank you to the witnesses (in order of appearance): Professor Nick Maynard, Hala Sabbah, Abubaker Abed, Dr. Victoria Rose, Jeff Halper, Emily Tripp, Dr. Natalie Roberts, Ben Jamal, Tareq Abu Azzoum, Francesca Albanese, Dr. Ralph Wilde, Paula Gaviria Betancur, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Katie Fallon, Richard Burgon MP, John McEvoy, Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, Professor Nicos Trimikliniotis, Matt Kennard, Forz Khan, Mark Smith, Fran Heathcote, Sara Husseini, Eyal Weizman, Richard Falk, Rami Khayal, Guillaume Long, Dr. Raz Segal, Gearóid Ó Cuinn, and Tayab Ali for giving up your time to testify at the Tribunal. Your courage, resilience and commitment to justice is a true inspiration to us all.
Thank you to Artin Giles, Oly Durose, Matthew Pearce, Mercedes May Hildreth, James Schneider, Samuel Sweek, Sinéad Carroll and many others for your invaluable assistance in putting this report together. Thank you to all the staff at the Peace & Justice Project – as well as Cai Finch, Miriam Stewart and Richard Baldwin, Ezzideen Abou-Daya and Carmel Kittana – for making the Gaza Tribunal possible.
We also want to thank every single person who has demonstrated and campaigned against Britain’s complicity in genocide. History will remember that you stood up for our common inhumanity in the face of the greatest crime of our time.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Gaza Tribunal, held on September 4-5, 2025, brought together witnesses, whistleblowers, experts, scholars and political figures to examine Britain’s complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The Tribunal was held in Church House, Westminster, and was overseen by the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Corbyn MP, Dr. Shahd Hammouri and Professor Neve Gordon. [1] [2]
At the time of writing, the official death toll in Gaza has exceeded 73,000, of whom at least 20,000 are children. These conservative figures do not include an untold number of people lost under the rubble. According to a study published in February 2026 by the Lancet Global Health medical journal, the death toll exceeded 75,000 more than a year ago—and the real figure could be closer to 186,000. At least 170,000 more have been injured; Gaza is now the home of the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. More than 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or destroyed, including more than 90 percent of housing, 97 percent of schools, thirty-three of thirty-six hospitals, and all the universities. More than 95 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable. At least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip have been displaced. Right now, over a million Palestinians are living in squalid tents without electricity, running water or a sewage system. [3] [5] [4]
The Gaza Tribunal provided a platform for survivors, witnesses and experts to uncover the devastating scope of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the true scale of British involvement. The Tribunal serves as a historical repository of evidence of British complicity in one of the greatest crimes of our time, with the aim of mobilising global support in the pursuit of justice, liberation, freedom and peace for the people of Palestine.
(Notes)
[1] UNRWA, UNRWA Situation Report #207 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, February 4, 2026, https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-207-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem
[2] Michael Spagat et al., “Violent and Non-Violent Death Tolls for the Gaza Conflict: New Primary Evidence from a Population-Representative Field Survey,” The Lancet Global Health Journal, February 18, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00522-4 ; Mohammad Mansour, “Gaza Death Toll Exceeds 75,000 as Independent Data Verify Loss,” Al Jazeera February 18, 2026
[3] Samuel Granados et al., “Two Months After Cease-Fire, Israel Is Still Demolishing Gaza,” The New York Times, January 12, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/12/world/middleeast/israel-cease-fire-gaza-demolition.html ; UNICEF, Rebuilding Hope: UNICEF Expands ‘Back to Learning’ for Hundreds of Thousands of Children in Gaza, January 27, 2026, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/rebuildinghope-unicef expands-back-learning-hundreds-thousands-children-gaza
[4]“More Than 95 Percent of Gaza’s Agricultural Land Unusable, UN Warns,” Al Jazeera , May 26, 2025 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/26/morethan-95-percent-of-gazas-agricultural-land-unusable-un-warns
[5] UNRWA, Situation Report 184 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, August 15, 2025, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-sitrep-184-15aug25/
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Cumulatively, the testimony of survivors, lawyers, healthcare workers, journalists, international legal experts and academics established beyond doubt the following: the British government (both Conservative and Labour) has systematically failed to meet a range of legal obligations, most notably the obligation to prevent genocide. The evidence presented before the Tribunal reveals that the British government has been complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed by Israel.
Evidence further suggests that in some instances the British government has even been an active participant in these crimes. The violation of international law could implicate individual ministers and officials, including those who have authorised the continuation of economic ties with Israel, as well as the commission of arms trades, arm transfers and intelligence exchange.
What has happened in Gaza?
Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza. The genocide in Gaza must be understood within its historical context: as part of a decades-long, ongoing and systematic effort to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part. We heard from a range of witnesses who described in devastating detail the human and social reality of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. This includes:
1.The deliberate and near total destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, undertaken with the aim of decimating the conditions needed for saving and sustaining the lives of the sick and the wounded and destroying a key institution necessary for governing the population. This includes the targeting of Palestinian health workers and the destruction of healthcare infrastructure, which have had catastrophic knock-on impact on the health of Gaza’s population.
2.The destruction of the education system (Kindergarten through higher education), including targeted attacks on infrastructure, students and teachers. These attacks have harmed the educational prospects of young Palestinians who are unable to continue their education. Hundreds of teachers and professors have been killed, effectively wiping out whole fields of study for the foreseeable future. At a time when the Palestinian population in Gaza needs them most, it will take years to rebuild university programmes in social work, physiotherapy and medicine, as well as in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, law and history.
3.The targeting of journalists which has transformed Gaza into journalism’s graveyard. Israel created target banks and assassination lists of Palestinian journalists in Gaza and killed over 250 journalists and subjected others to threats, professional marginalisation and institutional abandonment. They were targeted due to their professional role of documenting the violence and providing evidence of atrocity crimes. The cumulative effect is not only the appalling loss of life, but the suppression of evidence and the erosion of press freedom.
4.The production of famine, via an Israeli blockade that has weaponised food and water; the criminalisation of humanitarian organisations; and the expropriation of vast swaths of land, the destruction of agricultural fields, greenhouses, irrigation infrastructure and fishing vessels. Israel has deprived the population of material indispensable for its survival, using the lack of drinkable water, severe restriction of aid volume, deliberate limitation of nutritional diversity, and prolonged suspension of food entry as weapons of war. The Israeli and US-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was a militarised “humanitarian camouflage” that used the cover and bait of a food distribution system to continue the mass killing of Palestinians.
What are Britain’s legal obligations?
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a High Contracting Party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a party to the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the ICC, and a state with longstanding diplomatic, military and economic ties to Israel, the United Kingdom has heightened responsibilities in relation to Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the wider Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Those responsibilities not only stem from legal duties and obligations arising under treaty law, customary international law, and peremptory norms (jus cogens), but also from a series of rulings issued by the ICJ.
At a minimum, the UK’s legal obligations require:
1.The immediate suspension of arms transfers and related military exports where there is a serious risk of use in genocide, crimes against humanity or grave International Humanitarian Law (IHL) violations;
2.The suspension of intelligence sharing, training and other security co operation that could materially assist unlawful acts;
3.Measures to ensure non recognition and non assistance in respect of Israel’s unlawful presence in the OPT, including review of its existing trade and investment relations with Israel and Israeli entities;
4.Support for humanitarian relief and opposition to policies producing famine conditions;
5.Full co operation with international bodies of accountability, including the ICC, ICJ and the relevant UN Special Rapporteurs, among others.
What has Britain done?
Britain has played a vital role in Israeli military operations in Gaza, including but not limited to:
1.The sale, supply and transfer of weapons that have been used to extinguish human life and destroy vital infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. This includes single individual export licences that have been supplied to Israel directly, and the indirect supply of components for F-35 fighter jets. Senior civil servants have exposed cultures of deception surrounding Britain’s assessment of Israel’s violations of IHL, which formed the basis of UK arms export licensing decisions. Similarly, the British government’s assessment of its legal duties regarding the prevention of genocide has relied on perverse methodologies that aim to shield the government from scrutiny.
2.Support of Israel’s criminal activity through the performance of Royal Air Force (RAF) surveillance flights over Gaza, and the role of British air bases in facilitating the transport, refuelling and maintenance of military equipment.
3.The provision of political and diplomatic support, which has empowered Israel to commit atrocities with impunity. This comprises the dehumanisation of Palestinians in political rhetoric, the justification of Israel’s criminal actions (in particular, by invoking Israel’s “right to self defence”), the hosting of Israeli officials, the failure to support international attempts at accountability, and the demonisation and criminalisation of international solidarity with the Palestinians.
4.The failure to impose sanctions on Israel and use other economic and diplomatic instruments in adherence with its legal duty to bring about an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. Britain’s continued political, diplomatic and economic support of Israel stands in stark contrast to its lack of support for humanitarian organisations and its failure to ensure the supply of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, including the failure to defend international institutions (as well as civilians on board Gaza-bound aid flotillas) from attacks.
Has Britain fulfilled its obligations?
The British government has failed in every single legal obligation outlined above. Britain’s failure to meet its legal obligations has contributed to the mass killing of Palestinian civilians and the wholesale destruction of civilian objects, the desecration of international law and the further erosion of Britain’s status as a nation committed to the rule of law in the international arena. Taking all these obligations together, we can conclude that the British government has failed in its fundamental obligation to prevent genocide and has been complicit in atrocity crimes. Evidence further suggests that in some instances the British government has even been an active participant in these crimes.
Next steps and recommendations:
We will work with domestic and international institutions, including UK cause lawyers, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, to draw their attention to evidence presented in this report, including violations of international law and evidence of criminal complicity implicating government ministers and officials. This includes those who have authorised the continuation of economic ties with Israel, as well as the commission of arms trades, arm transfers and intelligence exchange.
We also call on the UK government to:
1.End all military co-operation with Israel, including: a.All arms exports; b.Surveillance flights and intelligence exchange; c.Training, joint operations and security co-operation.
2.Impose economic sanctions, suspend its trade agreement with Israel, and impose a ban on all settlement products and services until it ends its illegal occupation.
3.Review all public contracts to prevent public institutions and funds from supporting Israel’s illegal occupation. The Gaza 20 Tribunal
4.Issue widespread sanctions against senior members of the Israeli government and military.
5.Conduct investigations against British citizens who participated in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the OPT.
6.Support South Africa’s submission at the ICJ in the case against Israel (January 2024).
7.Support international efforts to enforce the ICJ ruling (July 2024) regarding Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.
8.Support international accountability mechanisms by co-operating with the ICC and ICJ, and push for the execution of arrest warrants of officials wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
9.Stop the criminalisation of anti-genocide protest and de-proscribe Palestine Action.
10.Support Palestinian-led initiatives to rebuild Gaza, particularly in the health, education and food production sectors.
11.Establish a Palestinian Family Visa Scheme, modelled after the Ukrainian visa programme.
12.Restore funding to UNRWA as part of efforts to significantly expand humanitarian support for people in Gaza and demand that it be allowed to operate in the areas Israel occupied in 1967.
13.Join the Hague Group and adhere to the obligations it places on all participating states: to take all possible measures and enforce policies to end Israeli occupation of the State of Palestine and remove obstacles to the realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self determination.
In the interests of transparency, the UK government must also:
1.Release full licensing and export data to clarify the nature of military shipments to Israel to date.
2.Publish all legal advice regarding the UK government’s assessment of genocide and its obligations to prevent it as well as the legal advice relating to Israel’s grave violations of IHL.
3.Co-operate with a full, official, independent public inquiry into any co operation between the UK and Israel since October 2023. This inquiry must have the power to question ministers and officials involved in decision-making processes.
4.Provide the ICC and ICJ with all surveillance footage it has collected during RAF overflights of Gaza.
“I still hear their screams as we treated them without any anaesthetic.”
DR NICK MAYNARD
“Death may bring peace, but what I live through, this hunger, this endless fear, this unrelenting stress is a pain far beyond death.”
DR. MUHAMMED ABU MUGHAISSEEB
Part I: What has happened in Gaza?
1. Historical Background Informing the Testimonies
British involvement in Palestine can be traced back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1922 British Mandate. Even though in 1918 there were about 750,000 Palestinians of various religions and 56,000 predominantly Jewish immigrants who had moved to Palestine under the auspices of the Zionist project, the British government promised to establish a homeland for the Jews within the territory it had occupied, mentioning the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians in both the Declaration and Mandate only in passing and referring to them as “non-Jews.” During the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt against British rule, the colonial military brutally [6] [8] [7] suppressed the uprising. Between 1947 and 1949, when 750,000 Palestinians out of a total population of 900,000 either fled or were expelled by Zionist forces from their villages, towns and cities in a massive act of dispossession and expropriation known as al-Nakba (meaning catastrophe), the British government failed to prevent ethnic cleansing or to ensure that the refugees be allowed to return to their homes after the war had subsided. The British government even refrained from criticising the fledgling Israeli state when it destroyed 500 Palestinian villages and built 350 Jewish-only settlements on or in proximity to these villages’ remains. In this context, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a partition plan for Palestine in Resolution 181 (II) (1947), effectively normalising the colonial expropriation of Palestinian land and their mass dispossession. [10]
This was followed by the recognition of the state of Israel in May 1949, with no recognition of a Palestinian state. [9]
(Notes)
[6] United Nations, “The Question of Palestine: Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1947 (Part 1),” https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/ .
[7] Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020)
[8] Jacob Norris, “Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936–39,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 1 (2008): 25–45
[9] Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (Columbia University Press, 2007): 3–5, 295
[10] Alexander Kedar and Oren Yiftachel, “Land Regime and Social Relations in Israel,” in realising Property Rights, ed. Hernando de Soto and Francis Cheneval, Swiss Human Rights Book, Vol.1 (Rüffer and Rub, 2006): 137
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This brief history is important in the context of the Tribunal, because three quarters of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million today consists of refugees and descendants of refugees who fled from Jaffa, Asqalan and scores of towns and villages in 1948. [11] [12]
Since then, Israel has continuously and systematically adopted colonial policies and practices that seek to erase, dispossess and expropriate the Palestinians, while successive British governments have remained silent, providing support to Israeli governments that systematically abuse Palestinians’ rights. Following the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel established twenty-one Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and used these settlements to control most of the seashore as well as to create a wedge between the northern and southern parts of the Gaza Strip. By 1987, Israel had managed to restrict Palestinians to 60 percent of the land in Gaza and began a process of caging Gaza’s population within Gaza. In 1989, it introduced a policy of only allowing people with magnetic cards—which contained coded information about each person’s “security background,” taxes, and utility bills—to exit the region and, in 1991, within the context of the US-British-Iraq War, it implemented the first “hermetic closure,” which sealed off the Gaza Strip for long periods. In the midst of the Oslo process (a series of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) starting in 1993), Israel built a patrol road and a series of fences—totaling fifty-four kilometres—to close off the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, leaving only four passages connecting the two regions (two of which operate in one direction only, from Israel to Gaza) and one more connecting Gaza with Egypt.
In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided that it was no longer feasible to deploy hundreds of Israeli soldiers to secure the eight thousand Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip and decided to withdraw Israeli troops. Sharon thought that by implementing a unilateral “disengagement plan,” Israel could present itself as having de-occupied Gaza.
This, in turn, would help separate Gaza from the West Bank and allow Israel to fortify its West Bank settlements and entrench its control of the land. In 2005, the Israeli government dismantled the Jewish settlements in Gaza and redeployed its troops to the border. Israel subsequently transformed and intensified its control of the enclave from a distance, building military bases just outside the Gaza Strip, setting up remotely controlled machine guns on watchtowers, increasing the use of drones, and establishing a buffer zone 150 to 500 meters wide that eats up agricultural land while mandating farmers to limit themselves to short leafy crops such as spinach, radish, and lettuce, presumably to avoid blocking soldiers’ views. [13]
Two years after the 2005 withdrawal, Hamas was elected as the governing party in the Gaza Strip. In response, Israel implemented a permanent military blockade on Gaza, cordoning off the population in what many commentators have described as an “open air prison.” Recently, the ICJ, the highest court in the land, issued a ruling that the occupation of Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip, is illegal and must end immediately. [14]
On October 7, 2023, after seventeen years of Israeli siege and multiple rounds of deadly attacks on Gaza where countless atrocities were committed against the besieged population, the Al Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian armed groups infiltrated Israeli military bases, kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova music festival. Massacred on that day were 1,139 people, including 375 Israeli security personnel and 764 civilians, of whom thirty-six were children, while 251 soldiers and civilians were taken as captives and hostages. According to the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry, strong evidence indicates that Israel bears partial responsibility for some of these killings by invoking the “Hannibal Directive.” This controversial military protocol prioritises neutralising captors, even if it entails killing the civilians being held hostage. Israeli leaders immediately made clear that they intended to respond with eliminatory forms of violence against Gaza’s population. On October 9, following two days of extensive [15] aerial bombing by Israel, the country’s minister of energy and infrastructure, Israel Katz, announced that he had ordered water, electricity, and fuel to be cut off. “What was,” he said, “will not be.” The same day, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, demanded a “complete siege” of the enclave, stating that: “there will be no food, there will be no fuel.” His reasoning has since become notorious: “we are fighting human animals,” which suggests that he thought that the Geneva Conventions are not applicable in a war against Palestinians. On October 17, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, insisted that “as long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands… not an ounce of humanitarian aid” would enter Gaza—only “hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force.” The next day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the matter in similarly stark terms: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.” [17] [18] [19]
(Notes)
[11] Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014): 71, 195
[12] Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008)
[13] Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad, “The Road to Famine in Gaza,” New York Review of Books, March 30, 2024, 1, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/30/the-road-to-famine-in-gaza/
[14] International Court of Justice, “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024,” July 19, 2024, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176
[15] Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Detailed Findings on Attacks Carried Out On and after 7 October 2023 in Israel, UN Doc. A/HRC/56/CRP.3, June 10, 2024, paras. 223–233
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In response to the clearly articulated intention of grave violations of international law, Britain maintained a position of “unequivocally backing Israel’s right to defend itself. Notably, Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader at the time, publicly stated that Israel has the right to cut water and electricity off to the besieged population of Gaza. [20] These were all declarations of an intent to deprive the Palestinians in Gaza “of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies”—the legal definition of “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” a crime against international law under the Rome Statute and a clear warning sign of a potential genocide. Israeli newspapers, television, and social media, meanwhile, were saturated with calls to destroy the population, in whole or in part: to “erase” Gaza, “flatten” it, turn it “into Dresden. [21] [23] [22]
(Notes)
[16] Daris Widya Saskara, Polly Wilson and Iain Overton, “Why Did Britain’s Arms Licensing Regime to Israel Ignore the Genocidal Language by Israel’s Leadership?” Action on Armed Violence, January 19, 2026, https://aoav.org.uk/2026/why-did-britains-arms-licensing-regime-to-israel-ignore-the genocidal-language-by-israels-leadership/
[17] Amnesty International, “Global: Social Media Companies Must Step Up Crisis Response on Israel-Palestine as Online Hate and Censorship Proliferate,” October 27, 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/global-social-media-companies-must-step-up-crisis-response-on-israel palestine-as-online-hate-and-censorship-proliferate/
[18] Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Statement by PM Netanyahu,” October 18, 2023, gov.il, https://www.gov.il/en/pages/pm-netanyahu-statement-18 oct-2023
[19] Parallel Parliament, “Israel and Gaza: Rishi Sunak Excerpts,” October 16, 2023, https://parallelparliament.co.uk/mp/rishi-sunak/debate/2023-10 16/commons/commons-chamber/israel-and-gaza
[20] MEE Staff, “Israel-Palestine War: Keir Starmer Supports Israel’s ‘Right’ to Cut Gaza’s Water and Power,” Middle East Eye, October 11, 2023 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-keir-starmer-criticised-right-cut-gaza-water-power
[21] International Committee of the Red Cross, “Amendment to Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Starvation of Civilians as a Method of Warfare),” https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/icc-statute-amendment-art8-starvation-2019
[22] Patrick Kingsley, Isabel Kershner, and Edward Wong, “Israel and Hamas Step Up Rhetoric as Fighting Rages,” New York Times, November 15, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html
[23] Palestine Chronicle Staff, “‘Biblical Vengeance’: Israeli Politician Wants to Turn Gaza into Dresden,” The Palestine Chronicle, October 25, 2023, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/biblical-vengeance-israeli-politician-wants-to-turn-gaza-to-dresden
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On October 13, 2023—the day that Israeli authorities ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes within twenty-four hours— the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, said publicly: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible… It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” [24] For Herzog, there were no innocent civilians in Gaza. Echoing this sentiment, Netanyahu promised that the Israeli military would strike “forcefully everywhere,” in a war that he described as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” [25] [26]
In effect, Israeli leaders notified the public of their intention to disregard the basic distinction between civilians and combatants, choosing to attack the Palestinian people as a people. In the meantime, British media predominantly retained an overwhelmingly good-faith reading of Israeli sources and endorsed narratives that eased the justification of mass atrocities against the Palestinians. [27]
After two years of Israel’s genocidal campaign, Israeli forces had completely or partially destroyed 89 percent of the buildings in Rafah, 84 percent of the buildings in the northern Gaza Strip and 78 percent of the buildings in Gaza City. The human cost is difficult to quantify. In January 2026, a senior IDF official accepted the estimate of the Gaza Health Ministry that at least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed, of whom at least 20,000 are children (and these numbers do not include an untold number of people lost under the rubble). More than 200,000 residents have been injured. According to a study published in February 2026 by the Lancet Global Health medical journal, more than 75,000 people were killed in the first sixteen months of the genocide. [28]
(Notes)
[23] Palestine Chronicle Staff, “‘Biblical Vengeance’: Israeli Politician Wants to Turn Gaza into Dresden,” The Palestine Chronicle, October 25, 2023, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/biblical-vengeance-israeli-politician-wants-to-turn-gaza-to-dresden
[24] The Wire Staff, “Northern Gaza, Israel-Palestine Conflict,” The Wire, October 14, 2023, https://thewire.in/world/northern-gaza-israel-palestine-conflict
[25] David Gritten and Imogen Foulkes, “Israel Has Committed Genocide in Gaza, UN Commission of Inquiry Says,” BBC News, September 16, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8641wv0n4go
[26] Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Excerpt from PM Netanyahu’s Remarks at the Opening of the Winter Assembly of the 25th Knesset’s Second Session,” October 16, 2023, gov.il, https://www.gov.il/en/pages/excerpt-from-pm-netanyahu-s-remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-knesset-s-winter-assembly 16-oct-2023
[27] “Satellite Data Shows at Least 70 Percent of Gaza Buildings Leveled,” Haaretz, July 17, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-17/tyarticle-magazine/.premium/satellite-data-shows-at-least-70-percent-of-gaza-buildings-leveled/00000198-12de-d9c7-af98-7adffc8f0000
[28] Michael Spagat et al., “Violent and Non-violent Death Tolls for the Gaza Conflict: New Primary Evidence from a Population-representative Field Survey,” The Lancet Global Health Journal, February 18, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00522-4
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An earlier report in The Lancet stated that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” [29] [30]
Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. Israel itself has admitted that 83 percent, or over 51,000 of those it had killed are non-combatants, while among those it categorises as combatants are journalists, doctors, nurses, government officials and humanitarian rescuers. Moreover, 86 percent of the Gaza Strip remains within what Israel categorises as militarised zones, areas from which the population has been ordered to leave. According to the UN, at least 1.9 million people—or about 90 percent of the population—across the Gaza Strip have been displaced during the war, many repeatedly, and some ten times or more. [32] [31]
Since the announcement of the so-called ceasefire on October 10, 2025, through late February, Israel has killed more than 600 Palestinians and injured over 1,600. Israeli authorities, along with American and British allies, have imposed on Palestinians a foreign governance system that ignores basic tenets of international legal protections for Palestinians, as representatives of Palestinian civil society have attested. [33]
The genocide in Gaza must be understood in this historical context. In his testimony, Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, outlined a brief history of the settler-colonial project, underscoring that the genocide in Gaza needs to be understood as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing and expulsion. “If Israel can get rid of half the Palestinian population of the occupied territory, then it’s gone a long way again towards erasing the Palestinian presence.” This is how we should understand the genocide in Gaza: a decades-long, ongoing and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.
(Notes)
[29] “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential,” The Lancet 404, Issue 10449 (2024): 237–238
[30] “Israeli Military’s Own Data Indicates Civilian Death Rate of 83% in Gaza War,” The Guardian, August 21, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21/revealed-israeli-militarys-own-data-indicates-civilian-death-rate-of-83-in-gaza-war
[31] UNRWA, Situation Report 184, August 15, 2025, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-sitrep-184-15aug25/
[32] United Nations, “Palestine: UN Rights Chief Highlights Suffering, Atrocity Crimes ‘that Remain Unpunished,’” UN News, February 26, 2026, https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1167043
[33] The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, “Palestinian Civil Society on Trump’s ‘Peace Plan,’” October 2, 2025, https://www.thepipd.com/statements/palestinian-civil-society-on-trumps-peace-plan/
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This is the context in which witness testimony should be read, digested and understood. We now turn to that testimony, with summaries of some of the most harrowing evidence that was presented during the Tribunal, which provided devastating detail about the human and social reality of genocide.
2. Evidence Collected from Testimonies:
The Gaza Genocide We present the evidence organised into four categories: the destruction of the medical system, the destruction of the education system, the targeting of journalists and the production of famine.
2.1. The Destruction of the Medical System
The destruction of the Palestinian medical system in Gaza has been deliberate, systematic and near total. Since the beginning of its response, Israel has carried out over 750 attacks on Gaza’s healthcare facilities and staff in what can be characterised as “medicide”—which we define, following Perugini and Gordon, as the destruction of a healthcare system in whole or in part with the aim of obliterating or damaging the conditions needed for saving and sustaining the lives of the sick and the wounded. Several thousand civilians have been killed and injured in these attacks, among them doctors, nurses, medics, and ambulance drivers. About two-thirds of the hospitals are no longer operational, and those that remain open operate with limited capacity due to lack of fuel, medicine, medical equipment, and food. Dialysis and cancer patients, as well as many pregnant women have nowhere to go. Many people die each day due to causes that are medically preventable. [34] [35]
After the Israeli imposition of a complete siege on Gaza and withdrawal of the supply of electricity to the enclave, Gazan hospitals had to make difficult decisions about who to operate on and treat. By October 12, 2023, five days after the Israeli air strikes began, hospitals risked “turning into morgues,” with thousands of Palestinian civilians and children wounded by the Israeli bombing being left untreated. [36]
(Notes)
[34] Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon. “‘Medicide’” in Gaza and International Law: Time for Banning the Bombing of Hospitals,” Institute for Palestine Studies, Issue 094, September 10, 2024, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656099
[35] Rushdi Abu Alouf and George Wright, ”Gaza Hospitals Risk Turning into Morgues, Red Cross Says,” BBC News, October 12, 2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67087035.amp
[36] Alouf and Write, “Gaza Hospitals.”
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Beyond the damage caused to Palestinian healthcare by the withdrawal of basic services, the direct targeting of Palestinian healthcare infrastructure by air attack was also immediate and repeated. By October 15, there had been forty-eight reported attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip, causing damage to twenty-four, including six hospitals. By mid-November, the [37] [38] Palestinian medical system was deemed to be on the “brink of collapse” or already collapsed, according to various journalists and other observers, with over two-thirds of hospitals non-functional and only one hospital operating in the north of Gaza. UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese and Maarten van der Heijden, a health lawyer, argue that these attacks often took place or were excused under the “humanitarian camouflage” of international [39] humanitarian law, with the Israeli government frequently claiming, without evidence, that such strikes or attacks were undertaken as lawful strikes on terrorist infrastructure. Perugini and Gordon call this “medical lawfare,” a term they coined to describe how Israel has been justifying its systematic attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip, mobilising the laws of armed conflict related to “hospital shields” to securitise lifesaving infrastructure and legitimise their destruction. [40]
A UN Commission of Inquiry found that by December 23, 2023 there was effectively “no healthcare left in Gaza,” with the few hospitals that remained focusing on the treatment of conflict-related injuries. Attacks on Palestinian hospitals, via ground and air, continued through 2024 and 2025, underscoring that the Palestinian medical system was purposefully wiped out by Israel. [42] [41]
The IDF has killed over 1,700 medical staff and has taken hundreds more hostage since October 7, 2023. [43]
(Notes)
[37] Simmone Shah, ”The Gaza Healthcare System Is Reportedly on the Brink of Collapse,” Time, October 24, 2023, https://time.com/6328038/gaza healthcare-system-collapse-fuel-hospital/
[38] Shah, “The Gaza Healthcare System;” Humanity and Inclusion, Attacks on Healthcare and Impacts on Physical Rehabilitation and Mental Health Services in the Gaza Strip, November 2023, https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/sn_uploads/document/202311-Issue-Brief-Gaza-Health-Rehabilitation EN.pdf
[40] Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, UN Doc. A/HRC/55/73, July 1, 2024), 2, 22–24 , https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/55/73 ; Maarten van der Heijden, “The Well-Worn Playbook for Bombing Hospitals in War: Deny, Deflect, Justify,” The Guardian, February 26, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/2025/feb/26/the-well-worn-playbook-for-bombing-hospitals-in-war-deny-deflect-justify-time-for-the-law-to-close-these-loopholes
[41] Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Detailed Findings on the Military Operations and Attacks Carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 7 October to 31 December 2023, UN Doc. A/HRC/56/CRP.4, June 10, 2024, 62, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4051249?ln=en&v=pdf
[42] B’Tselem, Our Genocide, July 2025, 35-39, https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
[43] Medical Aid for Palestinians, “Two Healthcare Workers Killed Every Day on Average during Israel’s Genocide in Gaza,” October 7, 2025 https://www.map.org.uk/latest/news/1772-two-healthcare-workers-killed-every-day-on-average-during-israelas-genocide-in-gaza/
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Testimony expresses the desperate conditions faced by the Palestinian medical staff remaining in Gaza. Reduced to performing only lifesaving surgeries in a collapsed healthcare system, even these have often been conducted under rudimentary conditions, under torchlight and with a minimum of painkillers and anaesthetics. [44]
Dr. Victoria Rose, an NHS consultant plastic surgeon who has been on several medical missions to Gaza during the genocide, told the Tribunal that she operated on children daily, and described the nature of their blast injuries:
“Anything around them when the bomb went off is then whipped up and ejected at very high velocity and hits them. So, we were seeing children with bits of their body blown off.
I looked at one day’s operating in May and we operated on six children. We started with an eighteen-month-old child—that’s not the youngest child I treated—with a 15 percent burn. We then went on to a three-year-old boy with a 35 percent burn… I then operated on a five-year-old girl who had had her arm blown off. She was down for an amputation, but we managed to salvage half of her hand and most of her forearm and shoulder. I then operated on her sister whilst my colleagues operated on her mother in the theatre next door. Her sister had had her left cheek and shoulder blown off. I then operated on a seven-year-old girl who had had her knee blown off. And my final case was a thirteen-year-old boy who had had his left ankle blown off and his brother was being operated in the theatre next door.”
Dr. Rose described in harrowing detail the impact of Israel’s restrictions on medical equipment:
“When we were there, we ran out of analgesia, which meant that, unlike in the UK when we amputate your leg, we’ll give you some anesthesia, some local anesthetic into the stump so that you don’t wake up in pain. We were not able to do that. So, every day that I operated, the first six cases would be children and the screaming in [44] Humanity and Inclusion, Attacks on Healthcare, 5–6 the recovery room would not stop until about three in the afternoon and we had no analgesia to give those children. We also ran out of antibiotics. We had two types left, neither of which would be indicated [for use] in dirty open war wounds. We ran out of disinfectant solutions, which we ended up having to water down, and we ran out of scalpel blades, which we ended up having to re-sterilize.”
Dr. Rose described immunosuppression as an effect of malnutrition caused by Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid, which led to a sharp rise in preventable illnesses. The blockade also impacted the health of the medical staff:
“Obviously the malnutrition is very evident now in the images that are getting out. I think we really noticed it in our colleagues initially. All of the team that I went with lost weight. I lost half a stone in twenty-eight days. I didn’t see any fresh fruit or vegetables. I only ate the food that I took in with me. There was nothing else available.”
She told the Tribunal that her team survived on packets of reconstitutable food.
Dr. Nick Maynard described to the Tribunal the conditions faced by medical staff in Gaza: “The Israeli military went into the hospital. They dismantled the whole infrastructure of the hospital. They destroyed the scanning machines. They cut the cables to all the ultrasound machines. They cut the cables and destroyed all the dialysis machines. …
The Israeli military bombed the intensive care unit whilst I was operating in the operating theatre next door.
Health care workers have been directly targeted. More than 1,600 healthcare workers have been killed. More than 450 have been abducted, illegally detained, tortured. Many of them have been killed, including close friends of mine.
The infrastructure of the whole health care system has been nearly totally destroyed in Gaza.
We were operating with virtually no resources in the operating theatre. Often no water to use to scrub up to sterilize our hands and the equipment. Often no sterile drapes or sterile gloves because no aid has been allowed into Gaza. No painkillers.” [45] [46]
There is now a reduced number of facilities where operations can be performed, and rehabilitation services have also been destroyed. Severe shortages of medical supplies remain since the ceasefire, and no plans have been made to rebuild Gaza’s ravaged health system, a situation compounded by new and politicised restrictions on aid groups’ access to Gaza. Thirty-seven aid groups have been blocked from accessing Gaza under the new criteria, further depriving medical centres of supplies and support for their operations at a time when over 18,000 patients are in need of urgent medical evacuation. [47]
Dr. Natalie Roberts, executive director of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières [MSF UK]), provided more evidence of the targeting of healthcare and humanitarian workers. Several of her colleagues were killed. One, Reem Abu Lebdeh, was a physiotherapist who was killed alongside her parents and siblings in their house in December 2023 when the area came under a massive Israeli ground and air assault. The bodies of her mother and sister were eventually recovered from the rubble in February 2024, but Reem’s body has never been found. At the time of Dr. Roberts’ testimony, Reem was one of twelve Palestinian MSF colleagues who had been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023.
Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila and Dr. Ahmad Al Sahar, two MSF doctors who were working in Al-Awda Hospital, were also killed when the hospital was hit by an Israeli strike on November 21, 2023. Their colleague Alaa Al-Shawa, a nurse, was killed on November 18, 2023, when a clearly marked MSF convoy came under attack from Israeli forces in Gaza City, despite having authorisation to evacuate the area. Alaa was shot in the head. The MSF workers tried to stop the bleeding, but they were unable to save his life.
(Notes)
[44] Humanity and Inclusion, Attacks on Healthcare, 5–
[45] Humanity and Inclusion, Attacks on Healthcare, 5–6; James Walker, “Anger as Timeline Shows Israel’s Repeated Gaza Ceasefire Breaches,” The National, December 5, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20251208170312/https://www.thenational.scot/news/25673568.anger-timeline-shows-israels-repeated-gaza-ceasefire breaches/; Amnesty International, Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: Post-Ceasefire: Israel’s Genocide in the Occupied Gaza Strip Continues, November 27, 2025, 1–3, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/0527/2025/en/
[46] Amnesty International, Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: Post-Ceasefire, 2–3
[47] Amy Walker and David Gritten, “Israel to Bar 37 Aid Groups as UK and EU Warn of Severe Impact in Gaza,” BBC News, December 31, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1evp7weyv2o
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Dr. Roberts also testified that Israeli raids on hospitals have resulted in the arbitrary detention, torture, and forced disappearances of MSF staff. On October 26, 2024, during a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital, MSF surgeon Muhammad Obeid was arrested with fifty-seven others. He is currently held in an Israeli prison. No formal charges have been brought against him.
“Medical staff seem to be systematically targeted as one element of the deliberate dismantling of the health system in Gaza,” Dr. Roberts told the Tribunal. “Our medical teams are working under the harshest of conditions with little food for themselves while they’re watching patients die due to the Israeli blockade and bombardment.”
“All of our MSF colleagues have been displaced multiple times,” Dr. Roberts told the Tribunal. She quoted her colleague, Dr. Muhammed Abu Mughaisseeb:
“Before she died, my mother told me death can sometimes be a relief. I didn’t understand her at the time, but today, after all I’ve been through, I do. Displacement is harder than death. I’ve been forced from my home, stripped of safety, carrying my bag from one destroyed place to another. We endure hunger that eats our bodies, and a constant fear that drains our minds, and a psychological stress that never stops. It follows us in every breath, every thought, every sound of the night. And then there are the missiles and bombs. The roar as they pass overhead. The whistle tearing through my sky. The dreadful silence before they strike. Leaving me to wonder, is it my turn now? Now I know what my mother meant. Death may bring peace, but what I live through, this hunger, this endless fear, this unrelenting stress is a pain far beyond death.”
“In summary,” Dr. Roberts told the Tribunal, “I stand by our position that MSF teams in Gaza are witnessing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide according to the definition laid out in the Genocide Convention.” The damage Israel caused to the Gazan health system has decimated the infrastructure necessary to provide basic access to healthcare. This has important legal implications. Doctors Without Borders have termed the destruction of the Palestinian health system collective punishment, while both the UN Commission of Inquiry and Physicians for Human Rights Israel have deemed it an act of genocide. The UN has noted especially the obliteration of reproductive healthcare centres in Gaza, which represents an attempt to destroy the future of the Palestinian people. [48] [49]
The provision of healthcare is one mode of resisting the occupation and Palestinian dehumanisation. Deprived of the ability to provide healthcare, defiance and moral resilience against injustice in Palestine has been severely threatened. Without action, this diminishment of the Palestinian spirit can only continue. [50]
2. 2. The Destruction of the Education System
The Gazan education system has been decimated as a result of Israel’s genocide.
Educational institutions were not spared from IDF attack, reflecting a policy that is based on the view that the “entire [Palestinian] nation” was responsible for the war crimes that took place on October 7, 2023. The United Nations recorded more than 200 attacks on schools in Gaza by March 24, 2024, with fifty-three of these schools being totally destroyed. [51] [52]
(Notes)
[48] Médecins Sans Frontières, Gaza: Life in a Death Trap, December 19, 2024, 5, https://www.msf.org/life-death-trap-gaza-palestine; Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide, July 2025, 11-12, https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied palestinian-territory/position-paper-destruction-conditions-life-health-analysis-gaza-genocide; Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, UN Doc. A/HRC/60/CRP.3, September 16, 2025, 64, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf
[49] Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza, 47–48
[50] Amina Mukhtar, “First, Do No Harm: In Defense as the Doctor as a Political Figure,” Law Beyond Borders, Substack, June 14, 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-165910569
[51] Paul Blumenthal, “Israeli President Suggests That Civilians In Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” HuffPost, October 13, 2023, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65295ee8e4b03ea0c004e2a8 ; Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Detailed Findings, UN Doc. A/HRC/56/CRP.3, 54–59, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session56/a-hrc-56-crp-3.pdf
[52] United Nations, “Gaza War: ‘Direct Hits’ on More than 200 Schools Since Israeli Bombing Began,” UN News, March 27, 2024, https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1148031
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Nearly three months later, by June 2024, 76 percent of schools required “full reconstruction or major rehabilitation,” and by August 2024, 85 percent of Gaza’s 737 schools had been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks. [53] [54] [55]
May 2025 marked a peak in Israeli violence against the Palestinian education system, 95.5 percent of institutions having suffered damage by this time. By April 2024, six months into Israel’s attacks, already 261 teachers had been killed and 756 injured, while as we write this report, the number of teachers and other educational staff who have been killed has risen to at least 782. Repeatedly, schools have been struck by attacks from the air, in many cases after they had been converted into shelters for displaced Palestinians. [56] [57] [58]
Higher education has also been targeted in Gaza. By July 2024, all nineteen Gazan universities had suffered severe damage, with 80 percent of university buildings destroyed and 90,000 students prevented from carrying on their studies. At least 105 academics have been killed, many purposefully, decimating a source of future learning for the Palestinian people.
The damage to primary and higher education has severely curtailed the educational prospects of young Gazans who are unable to continue their education—approximately 625,000 young people, according to recent estimates. [59] The Gaza People’s Tribunal and others have termed this a scholasticide: the destruction of Palestine’s intellectual future through the elimination of a generation of teachers, students and their educational institutions. [60]
(Notes)
[53] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Humanitarian Situation Update #179: Gaza Strip, June 14, 2024, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-179-gaza-strip ; AJ Labs, “Israel’s Intensifying Attacks on Gaza Schools,” Al Jazeera, August 14, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/14/israels-intensifyingattacks-on-gaza-schools#:~:text=Almost%2085%20percent%20of%20school,have%20been%20damaged%20or%20destroyed
[54] European Training Foundation, Education and Training in the West Bank and Gaza: Facts and Figures, June 2025, 6, https://www.etf.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-07/Gaza%20update%202025%20final%20072025.pdf
[55] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN Experts Deeply Concerned over ‘Scholasticide’ in Gaza,” April 18, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza ; Islamic Relief, “Gaza’s Education Crisis,” February 17, 2026, https://www.google.com/url?q=https://islamic-relief.org/news/gazas-educationcrisis/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1771419289333358&usg=AOvVaw0lhknEUZ84MWAw3dNnqY1k
[56] Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Simon Lewis and Suleiman Al-Khalidi, “Arab Leaders Press Blinken for Gaza Ceasefire after School Blasts,” Reuters, November 4, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-arab-leaders-meet-over-gaza-palestinian-deaths-mount-2023-11-03/ ; Meron Rapoport, “Israeli Society’s Dehumanization of Palestinians is Now Absolute,” +972 Magazine, August 23, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240825043602/https://www.972mag.com/dehumanization-moral-abyss-israelis/
[57] Sondos Fayoumi, “Every University in Gaza Has Been Destroyed. So Have These Students’ Dreams,” The Nation, July 26, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-students-future/
[58] Ibtisam Mahdi, “The Decimation of Gaza’s Academia is Impossible to Quantify,” +972 Magazine, July 26, 2024, https://www.972mag.com/gaza academia-destruction-universities/
[59] Liam Stack and Bilal Shbair, “With Schools in Ruins, Education in Gaza Will Be Hobbled for Years,” The New York Times, May 6, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20250206204657/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/world/middleeast/gaza-schools-damaged-destroyed.html
[60] Final Statement from the Jury of Conscience, October 26, 2025, 2, https://izu.edu.tr/docs/default-source/ciga documents/final-gtj-statement.pdf; Chandni Desai, “Israel Has Destroyed or Damaged 80% of Schools in Gaza. This is Scholasticide,” The Guardian, June 8, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/08/israel-destroying-schools-scholasticide – Last accessed 10/01/2026; Gaza Academics and Administrators, “Open Letter by Gaza Academics and University Administrators to the World,” Al Jazeera, May 29, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/29/open-letter-by-gaza-academics-and-university-administrators-to-theworld#:~:text=We%20call%20upon%20our%20friends,integrity%20of%20our%20academic%20institutions
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There has been an almost ritualistic element in this violence against educational institutions. IDF soldiers have been recorded cheering at the destruction of UNRWA schools, while it also appears relatively commonplace for Israeli troops to film or photograph themselves vandalising schools and burning libraries. [61] The most prominent example of this trend occurred at the Israa University, which was destroyed via controlled demolition on January 18, 2024. The University had previously been converted into a military barracks by the IDF and had served as such for seventy days until its final (and filmed) destruction. [62] [63]
These brazen attacks on educational infrastructure have wiped out generations of Palestinian cultural presence. Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of Israa University, noted that thousands of pre-Islamic, Islamic and Roman artifacts were destroyed or looted from the university, eradicating the ability of Palestinians to speak of their own history, heritage and cultural memory. With the destruction of the other eighteen universities across Gaza, the Palestinian presence in history is further erased, leaving behind ruins. [64]
Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” [65] The obliteration of Palestinian schools and universities aims to destroy Palestinian prosperity, culture, and the potential of future generations to place themselves in history. It can be termed nothing other than genocidal, a policy that seeks to disintegrate the sentiment that binds together the Palestinian nation; while the material Palestinian nation is destroyed in hails of bombs and missile strikes. [66]
(Notes)
[61] Wyre Davies, “Gaza Destruction Risks Lost Generation of Children, Says UN Official,” BBC News, January 19, 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68023080 ; Aric Toler, Sarah Kerr, Adam Sella, Arijeta Lajka and Chevaz Clarke, “What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans,” New York Times, February 6, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240725184618/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html – Last accessed 10/01/2026; “Israeli Soldiers Burn Al-Aqsa University Library in Gaza Strip,” a news, May 24, 2024, https://www.anews.com.tr/middle-east/2024/05/24/israeli-soldiers-burn-al-aqsa-university-library-in-gaza-strip
[62] “Israel Blows Up Another University in Gaza,” Middle East Monitor, January 18, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240118-israels-military-occupies-and-destroys-israa-university-in-gaza/
[63] “No University Left Standing in Gaza,” The Intercept, February 9, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/02/09/deconstructed-gaza-university-education/
[64] Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, “Statement on Why We Call the Israeli Attack on Gaza Genocide,” December 29, 2023, https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statement-on-why-we-call-the-israeli-attack-on-gaza-genocide
[65] Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79–95
[66] Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation,” 1882, https://web.archive.org/web/20110827065548/http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_renan.html
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2. 3. The Targeting of Journalists
Israel’s killing of over 250 Palestinian journalists since October 7, 2023, briefly attracted international attention after it was calculated that more journalists have died in Gaza than died in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined. As part of its effort to eliminate witnesses and control the narrative, Israel has, as one commentator wrote, transformed Gaza into journalism’s graveyard. Indeed, since the start of the war on Gaza, Palestinian journalists have operated in conditions marked not only by generalised danger, but by what multiple journalists describe as a deliberate pattern of targeting and intimidation of journalists because of their professional role. Journalists on the ground have consistently characterised themselves as simultaneously witnesses to events and direct targets of harm. [67] [69] [68]
Journalist Abubaker Abed reported that during his work in Gaza, he was directly threatened by Israeli sources, and he was subject to coordinated harassment on social media and what he describes as smear campaigns portraying journalists as legitimate military targets. He situated these threats within a broader pattern of killings of journalists since the onset of the war, which he characterises as systematic, not incidental. According to Abed, such narratives are used to justify attacks on journalists by alleging covert or improper activity, despite the reality that Gaza-based reporters are engaged in continuous, visible and time-sensitive documentation work that leaves no plausible basis for claims of “secret” terrorism. In parallel, multiple international press freedom monitors and United Nations actors have described Gaza as an exceptionally dangerous environment for media workers, with unusually high levels of journalist fatalities and injuries reported over the course of the conflict. As they note, figures vary by methodology and inclusion criteria.) Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has reported an exceptionally high journalist death count in Gaza and has stated that a substantial subset of cases appear plausibly connected to the victims’ journalistic work; they have also documented parallel patterns of obstruction and pressure affecting journalists in the West Bank. [70]
(Notes)
[67] Committee to Protect Journalists, 2024 is Deadliest Year for Journalists in CPJ history; Almost 70% Killed by Israel, February 12, 2025, cpj.org/special-reports/2024-is-deadliest-year-for-journalists-in-cpj-history-almost-70-percent-killed-by-israel/ ; Costs of War, News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World, April 1, 2025, https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/news-graveyards-how-dangers-war-reporters endanger-world
[68] Anthony Beanger, “Gaza Has Become Journalism’s Graveyard. Killing Journalists is Killing the Truth.” The Guardian, October 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/03/gaza-conflict-killing-journalists-has-become-journalisllm-graveyard
[69] Committee to Protect Journalists, “Israel-Gaza War,” https://cpj.org/issue/israel-gaza-war/
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Journalists in Gaza have repeatedly sought protection from international media organisations and press-freedom bodies, including entities tasked with journalist safety, as Abed attests, yet they have experienced these efforts as ineffective or ignored. In his account, Abed states that this absence of meaningful protection or accountability has reinforced the perception that journalists are exposed without recourse, even as fatalities mount. He describes a moment in which threats against him caused acute fear for his family’s safety, crystallising the realisation that neither international institutions nor media employers would intervene to protect Palestinian journalists. He frames this experience as emblematic of what has occurred to hundreds of journalists, whom he believes have been deliberately targeted in part because the press in Gaza has been publicly framed as a threat. In addition to physical danger, Abed describes professional mistreatment by internatiod professional recognition of Palestinian journalists. In his assessment, the failure of Western media institutions to report fully or to defend their local journalists has materially contributed to continued violence, by limiting scrutiny and normalising the silencing of those documenting events on the ground. nal media outlets, including instances in which journalists were commissioned for work but not paid, or had their bylines removed without explanation. He characterises these practices as efforts by international outlets to shield themselves from political pressure, at the expense of the safety, livelihood, and professional recognition of Palestinian journalists. In his assessment, the failure of Western media institutions to report fully or to defend their local journalists has materially contributed to continued violence, by limiting scrutiny and normalising the silencing of those documenting events on the ground.
Beyond the overall scale of casualties, press freedom organisations and UN experts have raised concern about the recurrence of incidents in which journalists identifiable as such were harmed during or shortly after strikes, including circumstances giving rise to allegations of unlawful targeting, reckless disregard, or failure to take feasible precautions. oreover, several incidents reported in major international media and referenced by the UN [71] illustrate the acute dangers faced by journalists even when operating near civilian sites. For example, coverage of a strike on Nasser Hospital in Gaza described fatalities that included journalists and prompted UN calls for investigations and accountability, alongside reporting that the strike sequence raised concerns about resulting harm to responders and media at the scene. [72] More broadly, UN experts have publicly linked the multiple killings of journalists to the risk of eliminating independent documentation, warning that continued losses may result in journalists being silenced as a class of witnesses. [73]
(Notes)
[70] Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “Palestine,” https://rsf.org/en/country/palestine
[71] Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Assassination of Truth: Killing of Journalists amid Genocide in Gaza, n.d., content/uploads/2025/09/Journalists-Report-EN.pdf https://pchrgaza.org/wp ; United Nations Office at Geneva, “Gaza: UNESCO Condemns ‘Unacceptable’ Killing of Journalists,” August 12, 2025, https://www.ungeneva.org/en/news-media/news/2025/08/109495/gaza-unesco-condemns-unacceptable-killing-journalists
[72] William Christou and Emma Graham-Harrison, “‘There Needs to Be Justice,’ UN Tells Israel after Gaza Hospital Bombing,” The Guardian, August 26, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/un-demands-investigations-into-gaza-hospital-killings
[73] United Nations, “OHCHR: There Can Be No Talk of a Free Press in the Occupied Palestinian Territory if Journalists Are Being Killed, and Threatened for Their Work,” May 2, 2025, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-there-can-be-no-talk-of-a-free-press-in-the-occupied-palestinian-territory-if journalists-are-being-killed-and-threatened-for-their-work
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Similarly, journalist Tareq Abu Azzoum describes Gaza-based journalists as occupying a uniquely perilous role: they are not only reporting on the conflict but living through it as civilians while documenting the deaths of colleagues and family members, over 700 of whom have been killed. He recounts that numerous journalists have been killed while actively reporting in the field, including while documenting attacks near the sea, and others while sheltering with their families in temporary refuges. These deaths, he emphasises, underscore that journalists are not merely exposed to incidental risk but are being struck in circumstances that suggest a profound lack of protection for press workers and, by association, their families.
Abu Azzoum further links the danger faced by Palestinian journalists to the near total absence of international media outlets operating independently inside Gaza. He characterises this prohibition set by Israel as creating conditions in which the full reality of events is obscured, while local journalists, despite severe technical, logistical and security constraints, remain the primary conduit for information from the territory. In his account, the sustained reliance on local journalists, combined with their systematic exposure to harm, reflects a method by which the flow of information, and indeed, evidence, is constrained: when those who document events are killed, threatened or discredited, the public record itself is imperiled. Separate reporting that cites the International Federation of Journalists similarly placed Gaza among the deadliest contexts for press workers, while noting Israel’s positioning of journalists as press combatants. [74]
(Notes)
[74] International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), “Israel: Two Years of Killing Journalists and Controlling the Narrative in Gaza,” press release, October 7, 2025, https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-releases/article/israel-two-years-of-killing-journalists-and-controlling-the-narrative-in gaza
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Taken together, these accounts contribute to a broader evidentiary picture in which Palestinian journalists in Gaza are subjected to threats, lethal violence, professional marginalisation and institutional abandonment, all in connection with their role in documenting the violence and providing evidence of atrocity crimes. The cumulative effect, as described by journalists themselves, is not only the loss of life and safety, but the erosion of independent reporting and the suppression of evidence. This context is directly relevant to assessments of press freedom, civilian protection and the preservation of truthful accounts of events occurring in Gaza during the hostilities.
2.4. The Production of Famine
Since early 2025, conditions in Gaza have evolved from chronic food insecurity into what humanitarian actors describe as a manufactured famine, driven not by natural scarcity but by the deliberate destruction of agricultural lands, greenhouses, and irrigation infrastructure—all vital sources of food. Forensic Architecture, a group that uses architectural tools to investigate human rights violations, claims that “the destruction of agricultural land and infrastructure in Gaza is a deliberate act of ecocide.” Already in the early months of Israel’s onslaught, large swathes of that land were razed by soldiers using D9 bulldozers and explosives to expand the “buffer zone” on Gaza’s side of the border from three hundred meters to an estimated eight hundred meters. Israeli naval forces have also damaged or destroyed around 70 percent of Gaza’s fishing vessels. Driven by hunger, a few fishermen still go out to sea in small vessels, risking the wrath of naval forces; some of them have been attacked and killed, as the fishermen’s association in Gaza reports. [75] [76] [77]
(Notes)
[75] Extensive reporting on the famine is available, including: United Nations, “Israel: Ban on 37 Aid Groups Makes Life Unbearable for Genocide Survivors in Palestine, Say UN Experts,” January 15, 2026, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/israel-ban-on-37-aid-groups-makes-life-unbearable-for genocide-survivors-in-palestine-say-un-experts/ ; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza Humanitarian Response: Situation Report No. 51, December 19, 2025, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/gaza-humanitarian-response-situation-report-no-51 ; Integrated Food Security, “Gaza Strip: Famine Confirmed in Gaza Governorate, Projected to Expand,” August 22, 2025, in-focus-archive/issue-134/en/ https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/countries ; Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “UN Agencies Warn Key food and Nutrition Indicators Exceed Famine Thresholds in Gaza,” July 29, 2025, https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/un-agencies-warn-key-food-and-nutrition-indicators-exceed-faminethresholds-in-gaza/en?utm_source=chatgpt.com ; United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Starvation and the Right to Food, with an Emphasis on the Palestinian People’s Food Sovereignty, UN Doc. A/79/171, July 17, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic reports/a79171-starvation-and-right-food-emphasis-palestinian-peoples-food
[76] Forensic Architecture, “‘No Traces of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza 2023-2024,” March 29, 2024, architecture.org/investigation/ecocide-in-gaza
[77] Fishermen’s Union, Gaza Strip, February 10, 2024, https://forensic https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=849046870566281&set=a.438917454912560
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Simultaneously, Israel has imposed sustained restrictions on the entry and quantity of food. This includes a concerted campaign to criminalise and eliminate the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), by far the largest distributor of food in the Gaza Strip. Humanitarian workers, medical professionals and international agencies have consistently warned that starvation in Gaza is the foreseeable result of policy decisions governing access, rather than an unintended by-product of conflict. [78]
Humanitarian worker Hala Sabbah reports that between March 2 and May 19, 2025, the entry of aid and commercial trucks into Gaza effectively ceased. According to her account, trucks stopped entering for an extended period, severing access to food supplies even for aid groups attempting mass distribution. She links this cutoff directly to the widespread images documented in June and July 2025 of children dying from starvation, explaining that mutual aid networks were unable to locate food in local markets because none was available to purchase. This period coincided with warnings from UN agencies that Gaza was entering the most severe phase of food deprivation seen during the conflict. Sabbah contextualises this collapse by contrasting it with pre-war conditions. During the seventeen-year blockade prior to October 2023, approximately 500 trucks per day were permitted to enter Gaza. While insufficient to meet full nutritional needs, this volume allowed the population to survive at a subsistence level. By contrast, she states that current access has been reduced to approximately seventy five to eighty-five trucks every few days, a fraction of what is required for a population exceeding two million people. [79] [80]
This account of sharp reductions mirrors assessments by humanitarian bodies that the volume of aid entering Gaza falls far below minimum survival thresholds. Beyond the drastic reduction in quantity, Sabbah emphasises that the composition of permitted aid has been tightly controlled. According to her account, trucks are restricted to a narrow range of staples, primarily rice, lentils and flour, while foods essential for addressing acute malnutrition are systematically excluded. Fresh vegetables and fruit, she reports, are not permitted to enter Gaza at all. Medical and nutrition experts have repeatedly warned that such diets are incapable of reversing severe malnutrition, particularly among children, pregnant women and the elderly. International health agencies have similarly cautioned that prolonged reliance on nutritionally incomplete food accelerates wasting, stunting and immune collapse, even when minimal caloric intake is maintained. [81]
(Notes)
[78] Gordon and Haddad, “ “The Road to Famine,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/30/the-road-to-famine-in-gaza/
[79] UNICEF, “UN Agencies Warn Key Food and Nutrition Indicators Exceed Famine Thresholds in Gaza,” July 29, 2025, releases/un-agencies-warn-key-food-and-nutrition-indicators-exceed-famine-thresholds-gaza
[80] World Health Organization, “Famine Confirmed for First Time in Gaza,” August 22, 2025, https://www.unicef.org/press https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famineconfirmed-for-first-time-in-gaza
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The human consequences of these restrictions were most acute in late July and early August 2025, when Sabbah describes starvation having reached its peak. [81] During this period, humanitarian workers themselves were operating under extreme conditions, with temperatures exceeding 35°C, while attempting to erect tents, search for food and provide assistance across displacement camps. Sabbah reports that team members regularly fainted from hunger and exhaustion while working, requiring intravenous fluids and nutritional supplements simply to continue their duties. These accounts align with broader reporting that humanitarian responders in Gaza have been forced to operate while themselves being malnourished. Sabbah further reports that during this time, community kitchens ceased operating for approximately two weeks, dramatically intensifying hunger. Community kitchens have functioned as one of the last remaining food sources for displaced populations, and their temporary collapse removed even minimal daily sustenance. When limited supplies of rice and lentils later resumed, some kitchens reopened; however, the portions they provided remained extremely inadequate. As Sabbah describes it, a “community kitchen” meal often consisted of a single pot of lentil soup shared among families of ten to twelve people, serving as their sole food for the entire day. Humanitarian agencies have characterized such rations as far below emergency nutrition standards and insufficient to prevent death from starvation.
This pattern—severe restriction of aid volume, deliberate limitation of nutritional diversity, prolonged suspension of food entry, and the collapse of community kitchens—has been repeatedly identified by UN bodies and humanitarian organisations as creating famine conditions. UN experts have warned that when starvation results from policies that obstruct access to food, water, and humanitarian relief, it constitutes not merely a humanitarian failure but a grave breach of international norms protecting civilian survival. aken together, the testimony of humanitarian workers such as Sabbah, [81] corroborated by international reporting and agency assessments, demonstrates that famine in Gaza has not emerged spontaneously. Rather, it has been produced through sustained control over food access, rendering starvation predictable, widespread and lethal.
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, told the Tribunal that even before October 2023, the Gaza Strip’s drinking water supply met only the needs of around 50 percent of the population. Following Israel’s military operations in Gaza, 90 percent of water and sanitation facilities—including water wells, irrigation, dissemination units and treatment facilities—have been destroyed and or damaged by bombing or blasting. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo told the Tribunal that, by cutting off water (as well as food and medicine), Israel was “using water as a weapon of war in clear violation of the fourth Geneva Convention.” Arrojo-Agudo received numerous reports of deliberate attacks against water personnel and humanitarian workers. In February 2024, Israel confirmed that its troops were flooding underground tunnels with sea water, causing catastrophic damage to Gaza’s groundwater, upon which the strip’s 2.3 million people largely depend. [82]
Arrojo-Agudo also described the crisis in sanitation. In November 2023, in some of the most crowded shelters in the south of Gaza, there was only one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons, making open defecation the only option.
On displacement more generally, we heard from Paula Gavira Betanur, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons. She told the Tribunal that almost 2 million Palestinians have been forced from their homes since October 2023. “Let it be clear”, she said, “this is not evacuation for safety”, but part of “a systematic attempt to dismantle civilian life” and “an attempt to push Palestinians from their homeland, not to protect them within it”.
Women and girls have borne a disproportionately heavy burden of the sanitation crisis. Arrojo-Agudo told the Tribunal that tens of thousands women have given birth “in the midst of this hell,” in inhumane conditions and without the means to feed their babies. It is estimated that, as of May 2025, there were more than 55,000 pregnant women in Gaza. [83]
The most serious problem, Arrojo-Agudo told the Tribunal, was that water is often salinised and contaminated. This has contributed to more than 70,000 cases of diarrhoea per week in children under the age of five.
(Notes)
[81] World Health organisation, “Famine Confirmed,” https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famine-confirmed-for-first-time-in-gaza
[82] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Israel Must Stop Using Water as a Weapon of War: UN Expert,” November 17, 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/israel-must-stop-using-water-weapon-war-un-expert
[83] United Nations Population Fund, “Situation Report: Humanitarian Crisis in Palestine”, May 16, 2025, Situation Report 17_April 2025.pdf
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“All these actions pursued by Israel,” Arrojo-Agudo concluded, “could amount to a pattern of conduct deliberately inflicting [severe damage] on the group’s condition of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” These actions, he said, violate the occupying powers’ obligations under article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Arrojo-Agudo reminded the Tribunal that deprivation of food access, including drinking water and medicine, is a crime against humanity clearly defined in the Rome Statute; and that Article Two of the Genocide Convention prohibits acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. “Every day we witness … evidence substantiating the essence of a genocide that we cannot ignore.”
Dr. Natalie Roberts’ testimony focused primarily on the Israeli and US-led militarised food distribution system known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “There is nothing humanitarian about the GHF,” Dr. Roberts said, describing it as “a new method of orchestrating the mass killing of Palestinians.” After Israel shut down UNRWA’s 400 food distribution sites, GHF opened four sites to serve over two million people. These sites, Dr. Roberts described, saw extreme levels of violence and led to the killing of Palestinian men, women, and children who went to the sites in the hope of receiving food only to come under fire from Israeli soldiers. She recalled how MSF medical teams would treat people with gunshot wounds, barbed wire lacerations, and crush injuries sustained whilst trying to receive food at these GHF distribution sites. Between June 7 and July 24, 2025, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that more than a thousand people were killed and 7,200 injured while attempting to collect aid in sites that became death traps. One victim was Dr. Roberts’ colleague, Abdullah Hammed, who was [83] United Nations Population Fund, “Situation Report: Humanitarian Crisis in Palestine”, May 16, 2025, The Gaza Situation Report 17_April 2025.pdf 48 Tribunal killed by Israeli forces on July 3, 2025, as he waited to collect flour from a truck.
Notably, one of the five founders of GHF, Liran Tancman, is a council member of the so-called Board of Peace overseeing the “reconstruction” of Gaza.
3. Conclusion
At the heart of Israel’s genocide is the indiscriminate killing of civilians. As Dr. Natalie Roberts told the Tribunal, “Israeli military actions have repeatedly targeted civilians with attacks leaving entire neighborhoods in ruins and families wiped out.”
The Tribunal heard from Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars, which documents civilian harm in war zones. To date, Airwars has published detailed incident reports outlining where and how more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza. “We have names. We have ages. We have professions. We know whether they were at home [or] sheltering in schools, whether they’re in an ambulance with their families in hospitals, whether they were trying to find food at an aid distribution.” Two further observations stand out:
These records tell us that by every metric, the level of civilian harm in Gaza is simply incomparable with any twenty-first century air campaign. It is the most fatal conflict for civilians that we have ever documented.
In nine out of ten incidents where women were killed, they were killed alongside a child. We found that on average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, they were killed alongside at least fifteen of their relatives. This is not like anything we’ve documented before.
Eyal Weizman from Forensic Architecture delivered a visual presentation of the scale of destruction in Gaza. Weizman told the Tribunal that the destruction in Gaza is “different than any other form of destruction that The Gaza 49 Tribunal Forensic Architecture has seen over the years;” it is a form of destruction that leads to “ungrounding.” Weizman explained: “Ungrounding is not destruction. It is the erasure of everything on the surface.” He stated that this “total ungrounding” was very similar to the type of ungrounding that was seen throughout the Nakba of 1948. In both cases, the destruction was part of the settler-colonial project, motivated by efforts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians through the “shrinking of the living space.”
The most harrowing part of Weizman’s testimony was the description of destroyed buildings as “mass graves.” Many thousands of Palestinians have not been recovered, and their bodies have been left in the rubble. Some of that rubble is being recycled as building material. This material is being piled up to create infrastructure for the Israeli army, barriers, bases, and detention facilities where Palestinian men are being tortured. “All the architecture is made out of this rubble”—rubble that contains the unrecovered bodies of Palestinian people.
Israel’s aim is “to redesign by destruction.” Construction is destruction. “Gaza is both a demolition zone, active systematic demolition of all traces of Palestinian life and a construction site.” This is the context in which we must understand the Western-backed “reconstruction” plans in Gaza, which Weizman describes as “the continuation of genocide by other means.”
“States including the United Kingdom have been on notice for decades of their obligations and they have not acted accordingly… They have an obligation to respect and ensure respect of international humanitarian law, and they have miserably failed this mission.”
FRANCESCA ALBANESE
The Gaza Tribunal Part II:
What are Britain’s legal resposibilities?
Segituko du: GAZA Epaitegia: Txostena (II)
1 Txostena luze samarra izanez, bi partetan azalduko dugu. (Gaur lehena, bihar bigarrena eta azkena).
