Lawyers calling for arms export ban file Israeli war crimes lawsuits in British court | Israel-Gaza War

Lawyers have filed claims at the High Court in London alleging that Palestinians are being tortured, left untreated in hospitals and unable to escape constant bombardment. They are seeking an order preventing the British government from continuing to issue arms export licenses to British companies that sell weapons to Israel.

The 14 testimonies, which comprise more than 100 pages, come from Palestinian and Western doctors working in Gaza hospitals, as well as ambulance drivers, civil defense workers and aid workers.

The graphic evidence is intended to support an application for a court order that the British government acted irrationally in refusing to ban the sale of weapons, arguing there was no clear risk the weapons would be used to breach international humanitarian law, the legal benchmark the government can use to decide whether to issue arms export licences. The Labour government is currently reviewing its policy.

The signed statements were made by witnesses, all of whom have been disclosed to the court, but only two of them have been named by the Guardian because of the need to protect families in Gaza from possible reprisals. The judicial review is due to take place between October 8 and 10.

The case was brought by an alliance of non-governmental organizations including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch. It is the first attempt to present such graphic testimony to a British judge about alleged Israeli war crimes since Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on October 7, killing over 1,100 Israelis and taking 250 hostage.

The previous Conservative government defended its decision to continue issuing licences on the grounds that there was insufficient risk that British weapons would be used for war crimes.

The Israel Defense Forces say they are acting in self-defense in accordance with international humanitarian law and that allegations of wrongdoing are independently investigated.

One of the witnesses, Dr. Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, said he treated a patient who was forced to stand for 48 hours and required a skin graft on his heel. He said he also treated a 60-year-old man who was stripped naked by Israeli forces, had his wrists tightly bound for three days and was dragged along the ground, wearing his wrist down to the bone.

He said: “Every part of the health system has been attacked and destroyed and is now completely unable to provide help. So many people are dying from diseases that are entirely treatable.” He said he had personally treated three children who he could have saved had he had access to the appropriate medicines.

He testified that when he visited the tent city in Rafah in March, water was rationed to three liters a day and there was one toilet for every 800 people. He said he was forced to set bones without painkillers and that on one occasion a hospital was so overcrowded that a man in his care died “on the floor in a pool of his own blood and brain matter.”

In the second named witness statement, Dr Khaled Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College Hospital in London, said that conditions in hospitals on both of his trips were “what he imagined medieval medicine would be like”. He said that many of his patients had been victims of sniper fire.

He said: “I understand that Israel justifies its attacks on hospitals by saying they are being overrun by militants, but in the four weeks I spent at Al-Aqsa Hospital, I personally did not see a single one.” He said he met many patients who had obviously been beaten in the detention camps and one patient who had been dragged along the floor by the external fixator holding his broken leg together.

He added that on his second visit, he treated a disabled man who “was handcuffed and blindfolded to a wheelchair for 30 days in detention, with his wrists tied to the right side of his torso.”

During his second visit, he found that staff morale had dropped, and by April “a feeling of fatalism had set in that this would never end.”

Another consultant, who works in the UK but was not named, described how he and a group of doctors were bombed in a so-called safe house on January 18. He said that “the incident was a reason for NGOs to stop sending humanitarian workers” and, despite assurances from British diplomats in Cairo that the attack would be taken up at the highest British level, he claims no one from the government in London contacted the medical team.

Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, a lawyer acting for GLAN who compiled and presented the evidence, said her only limiting factor in compiling the witness statements was the sheer number of cases of mistreatment and abuse.