Tribunal finds Britain complicit In Gaza genocide
The Gaza Tribunal's co-chairs say Britain is still arming and surveilling for Israel while jailing its own citizens for objecting.
Israeli forces have killed 1,256 Palestinians in Gaza since October’s ceasefire supposedly took hold, and Britain has kept its arms trade running throughout. That is the substance of the Gaza Tribunal’s finding of UK complicity, restated this week by the panel’s three co-chairs in their first broadcast interview since publishing a new book on Britain’s role in the war.
Jeremy Corbyn, Neve Gordon and Shahd Hammouri appeared on Democracy Now! on 12 August to mark the release of *The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide*. Asked about Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s apology for Labour’s handling of Gaza, Corbyn was blunt: it “isn’t really an apology” while the government keeps supplying F-35 components, allows Elbit Systems to manufacture on British soil, and criminalises the people protesting against both.
What the Gaza Tribunal found on UK complicity
The tribunal is not a courtroom. It is a panel Corbyn convened, sitting in London for two days in September 2025, that heard 29 witnesses: journalists, medics, academics, survivors, international law experts. Its conclusion, published in March 2026, was that the UK government “failed in its fundamental obligation to prevent genocide” and “has been complicit in atrocity crimes.”
Corbyn submitted those findings to the International Criminal Court the same month, asking prosecutors to interview British ministers over potential complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The tribunal has no power to compel that interview, and no reporting has confirmed the ICC has acted on the request. What it has done is put a documented case, built from sworn testimony, in front of the one body with jurisdiction to test it. Five months on, that case is still sitting there, unanswered, while the policies it describes remain in place.
The weapons Britain still supplies
Those policies are specific. In September 2024 the government suspended 30 arms export licences to Israel over the risk of international humanitarian law violations, then carved out F-35 fighter jet components, arguing suspension would “prejudice the entire global F-35 programme.” The High Court upheld that exemption as lawful in November 2025. Lawful is not the same as defensible, and the tribunal’s case rests on the distinction: a court ruling on process is not a verdict on the underlying trade.
Alongside the jets, Elbit Systems continues to manufacture components at British sites, and the RAF has flown at least 606 Shadow R1 surveillance sorties from Akrotiri, Cyprus over Gaza since December 2023, sorties the Ministry of Defence describes only as “hostage rescue” support. Corbyn wants all three ended: the F-35 trade, the Elbit manufacturing, the Akrotiri flights, along with intelligence-sharing with Israel. None of it has stopped. A bill he tabled for an independent inquiry into Britain’s military, economic and political cooperation with Israel since October 2023 passed its first reading in June 2025 and was rejected by the government at second reading a month later. He has a new slot to bring it back on 11 September.
Prosecuted at home for saying so
While that trade continues, the people objecting to it face the heaviest domestic crackdown in a generation. Since Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, roughly 3,000 people have been arrested and at least 138 formally charged under the Terrorism Act 2000, not for property damage but for expressing support.
Among them was the Reverend Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest arrested in Parliament Square on the day of proscription for holding a placard that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” She called the ban “total nonsense” and “a loss of civil liberties in this country.” In June 2026 a Woolwich Crown Court judge went further, applying a previously undisclosed “terrorist connection” ruling to sentence four activists, Leona Kamio, Samuel Corner, Fatema Rajwani and Charlotte Head, to four to eight years each over a 2024 protest at an Elbit-linked plant near Bristol. It was the first time the power had been used against protesters in British legal history. A pensioner and a priest on one side of the ledger, activists serving prison terms as convicted terrorists on the other: that is what “complicity” costs at home while the arms keep moving abroad.
An apology tested against policy
Burnham’s apology, posted as a video on 9 July, said “my party didn’t get it right” without calling Israel’s campaign genocide. He took office as prime minister on 20 July, Britain’s seventh in a decade, after Keir Starmer resigned in June under public pressure. To be fair to the record, his government has recognised Palestinian statehood and sanctioned some violent settlers and Israeli ministers, real shifts from the position Labour held when the war began.
But recognition and sanctions cost the government nothing it currently supplies. The F-35 exemption stands. Elbit’s UK plant stands. The Akrotiri flights continue. The 3,000 arrests stand, and four campaigners are now serving years in prison as terrorists for a factory protest. Measured against what the tribunal says Britain must stop doing, rather than what it now says it regrets, the apology changes nothing that Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, where settler attacks now account for 55% of injuries and over 93% of investigations close without indictment, would actually feel.
Corbyn’s inquiry bill returns to the Commons on 11 September. The ICC submission remains open, with no confirmed response. Until either moves, the tribunal’s finding stands unanswered by anything except a video and four prison sentences.
