Patrick Wintour
The Guardian / August 19, 2024
Case brought by NGOs is attempt to prevent the UK government continuing to grant arms export licences.
Claims of Palestinians being tortured, left untreated in hospital and unable to escape constant bombardment have been submitted to the high court in London by lawyers seeking an order preventing the UK government continuing to grant arms export licences to British companies selling arms to Israel.
The 14 witness statements covering more than 100 pages come from Palestinian and western medical doctors working in Gaza’s hospitals, as well as from ambulance drivers, civil defence department workers and aid workers.
The graphic evidence is designed to support a request for a court order that the UK government has acted irrationally in refusing to ban the sale of arms, arguing there was not a clear risk the weapons would be used to commit breaches of international humanitarian law. This is the statutory test set for the government to decide whether to grant arms export licences. The Labour government is reviewing the policy.
The signed testimony has been given by witnesses all identified to the court, but only two of them are being named by the Guardian due to the need to protect families in Gaza from potential retribution. The judicial review is due to be held between 8 and 10 October.
The case has been brought by an alliance of NGOs including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch. It is the first attempt to put such graphic testimony of alleged Israeli war crimes in front of a British judge since Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on 7 October in which more than 1,100 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.
The previous Conservative administration defended its decision to continue to grant licences, saying there was insufficient risk that UK weapons were being used in war crimes.
The Israel Defense Forces claims it is acting in self-defence in line with humanitarian law and that allegations of misconduct are investigated independently.
One of the named witnesses, Dr Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, said he treated a patient who had been forced to stand for 48 hours, requiring a skin graft on his heel. He said he also treated a 60-year-old man who had been stripped naked by Israeli forces, whose wrists had been bound tightly for three days, and who had been dragged on the floor, causing his wrist to be worn down to the bone.
He said: “Every part of the healthcare system has been targeted and destroyed and is now completely incapable of providing care. So many people are dying from issues that are completely treatable.” He said he had personally treated three children whom he could have saved if he had any access to the appropriate medicines.
He testified that when he visited the tent city in Rafah in March, water was rationed to three litres a day and there was one toilet for every 800 people. He said he was forced to reset bones without pain medication and that on one occasion, such was the overcrowding in a hospital 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 London, said conditions in hospitals on both his trips “were what he imagined medieval medicine must have been like”. He said many of his patients were victims of sniper fire.
He said: “I understand that Israel justifies its attacks on hospitals by reference to its claim that the hospitals are overrun by militants but in my four weeks in al-Aqsa hospital I personally did not see a single one.” He said he met many patients who had clearly been beaten in detention camps, and one patient who had been dragged along the ground by the external fixator holding his broken limb together.
He added that on his second visit he treated a disabled man who “in detention had been handcuffed, blindfolded and handcuffed to his wheelchair with his wrists tied to the right of his torso for 30 days”.
He said on his second visit he found the morale of staff had deteriorated and by April “there was a sense of fatalism that this would never end”.
Another consultant, based in Britain but not being named, detailed how he and a group of doctors were bombed at a so-called safe house on 18 January. He said that “the episode acted as an impetus for NGOs to stop sending humanitarian workers” and despite assurances given by British diplomats in Cairo that the attack would be taken up at the highest level in the UK, he claims nobody in government in London contacted the medical team.
Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, a barrister acting for GLAN, who has compiled and submitted the evidence, said her only limiting factor in compiling the witness statements was the sheer number of cases of mistreatment and abuse.
Patrick Wintour is diplomatic editor for The Guardian
