Today, a letter signed by 828 lawyers was sent to the British government. UK Judges’ and Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory – May 2025 – UK lawyers’ open letter concerning Gaza
As has been noted previously in Lib Dem Voice, and as the lawyers who signed the letter have now stated, the British government needs to take action, not merely voice concern, or issue threats of “concrete” action which so far have come to nothing. Keir Starmer and David Lammy both suddenly sounded statesman-like when they unveiled those threats, prompted, it appears, not by the nearly 20 months of disproportionate reaction to the October 7 attack by Hamas, but more likely by the televised images of starving babies which might be prompting the British electorate to ask why we are still supplying arms to Israel, and why we haven’t imposed sanctions.
The call from such a huge number of top lawyers and legal experts for positive action is something the government can’t ignore, and indeed it’s hard to see why the Attorney General, Lord Richard Hermer, hasn’t either demanded a change of course, or resigned. Not long ago David Lammy refused to comment on whether Genocide was taking place in Gaza, saying that wasn’t for a matter for the Foreign Secretary, and was for lawyers to decide. Lammy graduated from Harvard Law School in 1997, and may have forgotten that he is a lawyer himself, but it seems astonishing that he didn’t seek guidance from the Attorney General, or that if he did, Lord Hermer’s opinion has been kept secret from Parliament and the British public. No doubt the Labour government, exactly like the Conservatives who preceded them, regards embarrassing legal advice as best kept secret.
The Israeli/American plan to distribute food in Gaza, by-passing normal aid agencies
This has failed to achieve its own very limited objectives, to no-one’s surprise. Meanwhile the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tells us there are 171,000 tons of food embargoed by the Israelis, which could be safely delivered by humanitarian agencies, and which would feed the entire population of Gaza for three to four months. Instead there is a botched attempt by distrusted private security firms, amid fear that the plan is to kettle Palestinians in the south of Gaza using food as bait, or worse, to lure people known or thought to be associated with Hamas into the arms of the IDF.
Israel tells us they have replaced tried and tested relief agencies in order to prevent theft by Hamas and armed gangs, but of course, the problem they describe is entirely of their own making, because extreme scarcity of food inevitably creates a black market. If the traditional aid agencies had been distributing food in Gaza for the last few months, which they were always well able to do, the black market wouldn’t exist, and if Israel ended the embargo now, the black market would quickly vanish.
Time has been running out for the Palestinians in Gaza (and the West Bank) for so long, and at such an accelerating pace, that some MPs may be thinking it’s all over bar the shouting for the Palestinians. Instead, they should be thinking that now is their last, and best, chance to bring Israel to its senses, and at the same time fulfil the duty we have owed the Palestinians ever since Arthur Balfour made his infamous declaration.
Prime Minister Starmer must be made to realise that the hopes raised by his talk of concrete action (which, although undefined by him, would have to mean instant withdrawal of all military assistance, and sanctions imposed on Israel) will be judged worse than useless if all it achieves is further acts of defiance by Netanyahu, coupled with minor gestures like the ‘food for a few’ policy he’s now trying to pass off as a response to the starvation he himself deliberately engineered as a war tactic.
Netanyahu will be assuming that allowing in a little bit of food will let the UK/France/Canada coalition off the hook, and they won’t have to follow tough talk with tough action. In other words, there is a strong likelihood that Netanyahu, well-practised at leading world leaders by the nose, is going to get away with it again. Our government can now claim to have shown faint signs of refusing to accept that role, but it will be a test of British democracy if our MPs let the government go back into its shell after that brief moment of sanity. If we allow Starmer and Lammy to go back to sleep, and Israel goes on to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, we will all share the ignominy of having been given a supreme test on the world stage, and having failed miserably.
* Andy Daer is a member of the Liberal Democrats in South Gloucestershire.
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9 Comments
Excellent analysis & article Andy. We have watched for 20 long months Palestinians being massacred starved, displaced, hospitals destroyed & over 30,000 orphaned & maimed children. Every single humanitarian red line has been crossed. The time for action & sanctions on Netanyahu’s war crimes are long overdue. Silence is no longer an option.
I note that the author again fails to condemn the continued holding of hostage by the Palestinian side. That is the casus belli in so far as the vast majority of Israelis are concerned and no one is forcing the Palestinian side to prolong the war by insisting on holding those hostages.
Excellent piece by Andy Daer: would that the government took heed of the 828 lawyers. Unfortunately the government has already turned its face away from the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024, which many UN Member States pledged to support in the General Assembly on 18 September, but not the UK. Of what was it afraid, not to uphold the law?
It is also regrettable, to respond to Paul R, that Israelis seem unaware of Israel’s history of brutal repression of the Gaza Strip from 1968 involving widespread torture and house demolition, its subsequent illegal settlements until 2005 which so disrupted the lives of Gaza’s population, followed by its trashing of the election result in 2006 and its subsequent siege of the Strip, which left it as a permanent prison. All these led, step by step, to the atrocity committed by Hamas in October 2023. These causes cannot justify Hamas’ action, but they are essential to understand why it happened.
Indeed an excellent article by Andy Daer. In response to comments by Paul R I would like to draw his attention to the numbers of Palestinian “prisoners” being held in Israeli jails. These figures are published by the leading Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem. https://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners
In summary they say: “At the end of December 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 9,619 Palestinians in detention or in prison on what it defined “security” grounds, including 2,216 from the Gaza Strip. At that time, the IPS was also holding 1,705 Palestinians, 3 of them from the Gaza Strip, for being in Israel illegally.” The vast majority have never been tried in a court, the ICRC and others have widely reported on torture and abuse and one can reasonably describe many of them as hostages too. They too, including all the medical staff who have been seized from Gaza hospitals, should also be released.
@Paul R, you make an interesting point, which has already been answered by David McDowall from a historical perspective. I would add that my article was about the lamentable failure of the British government to act to end the slaughter in Gaza, not the causes of the war.
Few would dispute that Hamas committed war crimes on day one of this more than 600 day war, and what they did had a devastating effect on the minds of Israeli citizens. Fear and outrage combined to fuel what has turned into a hugely disproportionate response. Separately, some cynical Israeli politicians saw October 7 as a good excuse to continue the (illegal) annexation of Palestine. They see it as useful to continually hark back to October 7th 2023 as a way of blunting criticism of Israel’s response, and to justify the unprecedented ferocity of their assault on Gaza.
I believe the minds of the Israeli people are key to ending the decades-long conflict, and going along with the attempt to blame Hamas for everything happening in Gaza is not helping Israelis to take stock of what they have done themselves in the current conflict – almost 600 days of premeditated killing, compared with one day by Hamas, and now the use of starvation, openly admitted to be a deliberate war tactic. Imposing sanctions would force the Israeli public to question where they are being led by the current leadership in Israel, because it would be an unambiguous expression of our refusal to tolerate the path they have chosen.
Paul R. If a hostage is a civilian taken from their home and imprisoned without charge or trial and then starved and abused or tortured, then sadly Israel has held and holds many Palestinian hostages. It did so before October 7th and has done so in huge numbers since. Some have died from ill-treatment.
Where there have been charges and trials, many would argue that the occupying power has made it almost impossible for those under occupation to defend themselves in court, let alone in any other way.
The other point to be made is that it is a sad fact that no matter what brutality Hamas is accused of, Israel has chosen to stoop even lower in their treatment of the Palestinians. Again, that is not new.
Were Hamas to release all their hostages tomorrow, many prominent politicians in Israel still vow to complete the task of annihilation, not just of anyone who resists the occupation, but of all the infrastructure associated with any resistance. You can see the result of that.
Occupation by its very definition is imposed on unwilling people. There will always be resistance, and Israel’s brutality and ethnic cleansing has given the Palestinians no hope and little other option especially as many in the government of Israel have not only openly refused the possibility of Palestinian self-determination but are building more settlements to enforce that end.
The USA is reported as mediating between Hamas and Israel, but is far from neutral. The media by omission are suggesting that they are neutral. Fact is that Trump, (heavily backed by a majority of the US’s scores of millions of Christian Zionists and Evangelicals who believe in End-of-Times theology), has openly proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Now, if someone in Hamas were to propose the destruction of Israel, that would be reported as official Hamas policy! The USA has supplied more than enough explosives, financial sponsorship, surveillance and even boots on the ground to make Gaza unliveable.
Gazans are being starved to death and even loyal backers Germany are voicing concerns. Gazans must fear that acts of Genocide will become a major event, and so far, most signatories of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights have not lived up to their obligations to prevent the aggressor, Israel, from committing Crimes Against Humanity. ( The media generally have failed to question how Israel could possibly know the whereabouts of Hamas fighters at various times during the day over many months while it massacres men, women and Children to “get at them”).
The chaos resulting from the Israeli government’s attempt to dispense food to the starving people of Gaza has again been shown in reports today. The people have to queue up from the early hours, and when they reach the supplies they have to carry them away, meaning that any weak, ill, pregnant or disabled Palestinian has no chance of obtaining them. Then Israeli soldiers fire at the desperate people as they crowd forward. There must be the strongest international action, as Andy suggests, to demand resumption of aid by UN-approved organisations, and to condemn the continued military action and intentions of the Netanyahu government. I have asked my Labour MP to demand strong leadership on this from our Foreign Secretary. and our Foreign Affairs spokesperson Calum Miller to do the same.
@ Katharine Pindar. Well said, Katharine.
There are no excuses for what has happened and it is to be hoped that Sir Ed Davey will speak out about it.