A damning report published on 16 March 2026, following a tribunal into British government conduct since the outbreak of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, has concluded that the United Kingdom has failed every single legal obligation under international and treaty law, and has been an active participant in crimes against humanity, prompting calls for senior ministers to face investigation by the International Criminal Court.
The Gaza Tribunal, convened by former Labour leader and current Your Party parliamentary leader Jeremy Corbyn, sat in London on 4 and 5 September last year.
It heard testimony from dozens of witnesses and international law experts, including British healthcare workers, journalists, survivors, whistleblowers and legal professionals.
The report, co-authored by Corbyn alongside international law experts Dr Shahd Hammouri and Professor Neve Gordon, draws together that evidence with detailed legal analysis and a set of formal recommendations directed at the British government.
The report concludes that, through continued arms exports, surveillance operations over Gaza and the provision of political and diplomatic cover to Israel, the UK government has not merely been complicit in Israeli war crimes and genocide, it has, in a number of instances, been an active participant.
The report’s authors have committed to working with the ICC to draw its attention to evidence of criminal complicity implicating government ministers and officials, with particular focus on those who authorised the continuation of economic ties with Israel, arms trades, weapons transfers and intelligence exchange.
Corbyn, speaking after the report’s publication, said, ‘complicity demands consequences’.
‘In the aftermath of the Iraq war, governments escaped accountability for the role they played in catastrophic human suffering.
‘This time, we must achieve real accountability and real justice for the Palestinian people.’
He added that the report would ‘help cement the government’s legacy as a participant in one of the greatest crimes of our time’, and drew an explicit parallel with the political suppression of scrutiny that followed the Iraq invasion.
‘Just like Iraq, the government is doing everything it can to protect itself from scrutiny. Just like Iraq, it will not succeed in its attempts to suffocate the truth.
‘We will uncover the full scale of British complicity in genocide – and we will bring about justice for the people of Palestine.’
The testimonies collected by the tribunal are organised around four themes: the destruction of Gaza’s medical system, the destruction of its education system, the targeting of journalists, and the deliberate production of famine conditions.
The evidence presented under each heading is, in places, harrowing.
NHS consultant plastic surgeon Dr Victoria Rose told the tribunal she was ‘seeing children with bits of their body blown off’ as part of her daily operations in Gaza.
She described a single day in May in which she operated on six children, including ‘a five-year-old girl who had had her arm blown off’ and the girl’s sister, who ‘had had her left cheek and shoulder blown off’.
Consultant gastrointestinal surgeon Dr Nick Maynard described the total destruction of a hospital by the Israeli Defence Forces in methodical detail: ‘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.’
The report characterises this destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure as ‘deliberate, systematic and near total’, and the attacks on healthcare facilities and staff as ‘medicide’.
On the question of arms transfers, the report is equally unambiguous.
The UK has continued supplying weapons to Israel throughout the period under review, including components of F-35 jets described as central to Israel’s military campaign.
Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, a lawyer at Global Legal Action Network, told the tribunal that it had been ‘really quite shocking to observe how far this government is willing to create legal absurdities to defy logic … to employ every tool at its disposal in order to keep arming Israel’.
The report accuses the government of ignoring ‘blatant violations’ of international humanitarian law and applying a ‘skewed methodology’ when assessing Israeli breaches, one that examines isolated incidents rather than patterns or the overall picture.
That assessment was reinforced by an ex-foreign Office official.
Mark Smith, a British Foreign Office official who resigned in protest over continued arms sales to Israel in August 2024, gave evidence that although his own assessment was that ‘it was impossible to see how the UK government was acting legally’, his conclusions were repeatedly ignored and downplayed by his superiors.
Beyond arms, the report scrutinises the role of British military infrastructure.
RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus has been used to conduct spy flights over Gaza, and British bases have facilitated the transport, refuelling and maintenance of Israeli military equipment.
This operational involvement is cited as direct evidence of the UK’s active participation in the ongoing genocide rather than passive acquiescence to it.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration is also accused of actively undermining the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, by questioning the court’s jurisdiction, withholding support for the warrants, and failing to facilitate investigations.
Tayab Ali, director of the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, gave evidence on this point at the tribunal.
The report sets out that the UK’s minimum legal obligations under international law required the immediate suspension of arms transfers and related military exports where there is a serious risk of their use in genocide or crimes against humanity; the suspension of intelligence-sharing, training and security cooperation that could materially assist unlawful acts; active support for humanitarian relief; and full cooperation with international accountability mechanisms.
The government has been found to have failed on all five counts identified in the report.
Among its recommendations, the report calls on the government to release full licensing and export data on military shipments to Israel, along with all legal advice on its assessment of genocide and its obligations to prevent it.
It calls for all surveillance footage collected by RAF spy flights over Gaza to be shared with both the ICC and the International Court of Justice.
It also calls for a full, independent public inquiry into UK-Israel cooperation since October 2023, with the power to question ministers and officials under examination.
Following the report’s publication, the Peace and Justice Project has announced it will support distribution of the findings to members of the British Parliament and to the relevant bodies within the ICJ and ICC.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, of whom at least 20,000 are children. That figure is considered a severe undercount and does not include bodies still buried under rubble.