Throughout the war in Gaza, the UK government has been stubbornly consistent on the question of whether or not Israel is committing genocide; their position, ministers said, was that it was up to the courts to decide.
That stance has seemingly been jettisoned – at least according to a letter that David Lammy wrote to the international development committee on 1 September. In the letter, addressed to Sarah Champion, chair of the committee, Lammy said that the Foreign Office had carried out an assessment which concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza did not constitute genocide.
“The high civilian casualties, including women and children, and the extensive destruction in Gaza, are utterly appalling,” Lammy wrote in one of his final acts as Foreign Secretary, before the government reshuffle. And yet, the letter noted: “As per the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide occurs only where there is specific ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. The government has not concluded that Israel is acting with that intent.”
Since writing the letter Lammy has moved from the Foreign Office to the Ministry of Justice as part of Keir Starmer’s reshuffle on 5 September. Though his tenure as Foreign Secretary was short, it was long enough for him to attract considerable criticism over the UK’s support for Israel throughout the war. In July, the Conservative MP Kit Malthouse condemned Lammy in the House of Commons after the Foreign Secretary offered a tepid rebuke of Israel’s actions and announced that the UK would put aside an extra £40m for humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
“He has the temerity to show [up] to this House, wave his cheque book as if it’s going to salve his conscience,” said Malthouse. “Can he not see that his inaction and frankly cowardice is making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see the personal risk to him given our international obligations, that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction?”
That was not the first time Lammy had been accused of whitewashing atrocities. Writing on his Substack in September 2024, he sunnily cheered on the fact that “Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s” – a baffling way to describe the violent expulsion of more than 100,000 Armenians in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023; many have called the operation ethnic cleansing.
But if the conclusion that Israel is not committing a genocide is indeed the government’s new position, then it is an untenable one. First, not all cabinet ministers seem to be on message. On 9 September, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Times Radio that when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, visits No 10 tomorrow, he’ll need to answer “allegations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide”.
What’s more, it goes against the growing legal, humanitarian and international consensus that a genocide is, in fact, taking place. Earlier this month the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution stating that Israel’s conduct does meet the legal definition as laid out in the UN convention on genocide. In July, two Israeli human rights organisations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, concluded that the country is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a conclusion with increasing traction among the UK public: this summer a YouGov poll found that 55 per cent of Brits oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, and of those 55 per cent, 82 per cent believe a genocide is taking place.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday 9 September, Israel launched airstrikes on Hamas’s leadership base in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The UN’s secretary general António Guterres called the strike a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Qatar”. It’s a dramatic escalation in a war that has already seen Israel bomb Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and, of course, Gaza. Also on Tuesday, the IDF issued an evacuation order for all of the residents of Gaza City – amounting to more than a million Palestinians, many of whom are starving – as it prepares to invade and occupy the city.
[See also: Bell Ribeiro-Addy: “People are feeling disillusioned in Labour”]
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