• A war crimes complaint by Michael Mansfield KC and fellow lawyers state that 10 Britons engaged in targeted killings of civilians and aid workers in Gaza.
• Submitted on behalf of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Centre, the report—covering offences from October 2023 to May 2024.
A war crimes complaint targeting 10 Britons who served with the Israeli military in Gaza is set to be submitted to the Met police by one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers. Michael Mansfield KC, part of a legal team, will hand in a 240-page dossier to Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit on Monday. The dossier alleges that these individuals engaged in targeted killings of civilians and aid workers—using sniper fire—and carried out indiscriminate assaults on civilian areas, including hospitals.
Compiled by UK lawyers and researchers in The Hague, the report also accuses the suspects of orchestrating coordinated attacks on protected sites—such as historic monuments and religious structures—and of forcibly displacing civilians. For legal reasons, neither the names of the suspects, including some officer-level individuals, nor the full report are being disclosed.
Israel has repeatedly denied any involvement by its political leaders or military in war crimes during its assault on Gaza, which has brutally massacred over 50,000 lives, mostly civilians.
Mansfield, known for his work on landmark cases such as the Grenfell Tower fire, Stephen Lawrence, and the Birmingham Six, stated:
“If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly. British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”
The report, submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), covers alleged offenses committed in the territory from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile. Each crime attributed to the 10 suspects—some of whom hold dual nationality—is classified as a war crime or a crime against humanity.
One witness at a medical facility described seeing corpses “scattered on the ground, especially in the middle of the hospital courtyard, where many dead bodies were buried in a mass grave.” The witness also recounted a scene in which a bulldozer “ran over a dead body in a horrific and heart-wrenching scene desecrating the dead,” and noted that a bulldozer demolished part of the hospital. Sean Summerfield, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers who helped compile the dossier, said it was based on open-source evidence and witness testimony, presenting a “compelling” case. He added,
“The public will be shocked, I would have thought, to hear that there’s credible evidence that Brits have been directly involved in committing some of those atrocities,” noting that the team hopes to see the suspects “appearing at the Old Bailey to answer for atrocity crimes.”
The report argues that Britain is bound by international treaties to investigate and prosecute those who commit “core international crimes.” Under Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001, it “is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against humanity, or a war crime,” even if the crime takes place abroad. Raji Sourani, director of the PCHR, stated:
“This is illegal, this is inhuman and enough is enough. The government cannot say we didn’t know; we are providing them with all the evidence.”
Paul Heron, the legal director of the PILC, added,
“We’re filing our report to make clear these war crimes are not in our name.”
Scores of legal and human rights experts have also signed a letter urging the war crimes team to investigate the complaints.
