Rights groups take legal action against UK over arms sales to Israeli regime

International human rights groups seeking a ban on UK companies’ arms exports to the Israeli regime have lodged a complaint against the British government.

The Guardian reported on Monday that a group of NGOs, including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch, put forth a legal case to the high court in London seeking an order to prevent the UK government from granting arms export licenses to British companies selling arms to the Israeli regime in its months-long genocidal war against the helpless Palestinian people trapped in the besieged Gaza Strip.

In regard to the volume of evidence gathered against the Israeli regime, one of the members of GLAN's legal team mentioned the high number of cases of mistreatment and abuse committed by the zionist forces.

Britain has issued 108 arms export licenses to Israel since October 7

A total of 345 licenses to sell arms to Israel were still active as of the end of May, according to government figures.

Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, a barrister who helped compile and submit the evidence to the London High Court, said her only limiting factor in collecting the witness statements was the sheer number of atrocities committed by the Israeli forces.

More than 100 pages of legal testimony signed by 14 witnesses came from both Palestinians and Westerners who had worked in Gaza’s hospitals after the Israeli war machine started the genocide in October.

The witnesses for the case included doctors and medical staff, as well as ambulance drivers, civil defense department workers, and aid workers.

All the witnesses had been identified to the court, however, due to the need to protect the witnesses’ families, who were still trapped in Gaza, against reprisals by the Israeli regime forces, only two of their names were reported, Ben Thomson and Khaled Dawas.

Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, in his testimony, testified that he had 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.

Thomson said he had personally treated three children whom he could have saved if he had any access to the appropriate medicines. “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 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 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”.

Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College Hospital London, testified that 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 in hospitals. “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.”

Dawas testified that a disabled Palestinian man, who was detained by the Israeli forces, “had been handcuffed, blindfolded and handcuffed to his wheelchair with his wrists tied to the right of his torso for 30 days”.

The surgeon said on his second visit to Gaza he found the morale of medical staff had deteriorated and by April “there was a sense of fatalism that this would never end”.

One of the court witnesses, who is based in the UK but was not named in the report over safety concerns, gave accounts of 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”. Despite assurances given by British diplomats in Cairo that the attack would be taken up at the highest level in the UK, Dawas says nobody in the government in London contacted the medical team.

In the meantime, UK government officials claim British arms exports to Israel are insignificant. Last year, the then Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said such exports were “just £42mn ($53mn) last year.”

However, anti-arms campaigners, say the true figure of UK arms exports to Israel could be much higher because the items sold under opaque open licenses keep the value and quantity of the deals shrouded in secrecy.

Nevertheless, British arms giant, BAE Systems, reported the highest-ever profits in 2023, partly due to the US-led Western countries' war in Ukraine against Russia, and also thanks to Israel's attempt to occupy Gaza.

BAE Systems supplies essential systems for the Israeli Air Force's F-15, F-16, and, F-35 fighter jets.

British BAE systems supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza

The British weapons industry has been cashing in on the genocide in Gaza with a pivotal role being played by BAE Systems in supplying the Zionist killing machine.

The British weapons manufacturer provides the Israeli regime forces with electronic missile launching kits and heads-up display gun-sight technology for the F-16 aircraft.

Fifteen percent of the value of the F-35 fighter jet is made in Britain, with US giant Lockheed Martin boasting that the fingerprint of British ingenuity can be found on dozens of the aircraft's key components.

Britain and the United States, alongside Germany and Italy, have been the main suppliers of weaponry to the Israeli regime, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip since it launched its genocidal war against the densely-populated Palestinian enclave in early October.

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