Dear Alistair Strathern MP,
I am writing as a constituent to ask what action you personally have taken to hold your party leaders to account for their role in relation to atrocity crimes in Gaza, and the underlying situation of illegal occupation, apartheid and war crimes across the Palestinian territories.
Israel’s actions in Gaza are recognised as a genocide by Palestinian human rights NGOs; Amnesty International; UN Special Rapporteurs; the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories; the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel; and Israel’s own leading human rights NGOs B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.
This is not a new development. As early as November 2023, over 40 senior UN experts warned of a “genocide in the making”, with copious publicly-available evidence of intent to “destroy the Palestinian people”. Judges at the International Court of Justice have been warning that “all the indicators of genocidal activities are flashing red in Gaza” since early 2024.
As a major ally to Israel, with £5.8 billion in bilateral trade last year, a preferential trade agreement, close diplomatic ties, arms sales, security cooperation, and a formal roadmap in place for further strengthening relations in the future, there are countless ways in which the UK could make clear to Israeli leaders that failing to abide by international law will result in serious costs. Yet to the horror of rights groups, aid agencies and genocide experts, your government has mostly continued business as usual with Israel throughout this atrocity. As things stand:
- Your government suspended around 30 arms export licenses covering weapons for use in Gaza but has allowed hundreds of other arms export licenses to Israel to continue as normal. Export data shows your government approved export licenses for nearly £128 million worth of military equipment to Israel – in categories including “military radars, components and software as well as targeting equipment” – in just three months after imposing these partial restrictions in September 2024. That is more than the total arms sales approved by the Conservative government for the entire period between 2020 and 2023. Israeli trade data show goods exported from the UK since September 2024 include thousands of military items including munitions and parts for armoured fighting vehicles. While some of these goods may be for re-export to other countries, the Guardian notes that the UK “has no means of checking how the munitions it exports are used”. Ministers have also repeatedly implied that ongoing arms export licenses for goods to be used in Israel actually just cover innocuous items like body armour for use by NGOs. However, in parliament in June 2025, trade minister Douglas Alexander explicitly distinguished between licenses covering “non-military” goods and those covering “military equipment”, and between different types of end users – and he made clear that that the Labour government had allowed dozens of arms export licenses to continue which relate specifically to the sale of military equipment for use by the Israeli government or its armed forces. This includes parts for trainer aircraft, air defence systems and naval equipment – all being sold to a military that is committing genocide.
- Your government is still supplying parts, via the global pool, for manufacturing and servicing F35 jets which Israel has used to perpetrate its genocide from the air. Parts manufactured in the UK make up 15% of the value of each F35 jet. Israel has used F35 jets to drop massive 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza, each of which can potentially wound or kill within a 1km radius – an area far bigger than Hitchin town centre. The New York Times has shown that in the period up to December 2023 alone, Israel dropped hundreds of those enormous bombs on areas of Gaza where it had ordered civilians to take refuge. There is also evidence suggesting that under your government, permission may have been given for F35 parts to be shipped from the US to Israel via the UK.
- Your government has flown hundreds of RAF spy flights over Gaza and has apparently shared surveillance data with Israel, while “systematically” obstructing scrutiny of this surveillance and brushing off concerns that it could be knowingly or unknowingly aiding war crimes. Ministers claim these flights are solely for hostage rescue purposes. But even if that were true, it would still leave urgent questions unanswered. For example, in a single hostage rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024 (before Labour came to power in the UK), Israeli forces massacred at least 276 Palestinians and wounded some 700. Was RAF surveillance data used in that operation? Did your government take that massacre – and the potential for further such atrocities – into account in subsequent decisions about intelligence-sharing? Given that Israeli forces are engaged in mass atrocity crimes, are any mechanisms in place which could realistically prevent them from using surveillance data for unlawful ends?
- Your government was finally pressured into sanctioning two Israeli ministers for inciting violence in the West Bank but it still refuses to sanction Israel as a state or sanction any officials over atrocities in Gaza.
- Your government finally paused negotiations over a new free trade deal in May 2025. The fact that such talks had continued until that time with a state that was clearly engaged in mass atrocity crimes is indefensible. But then, just a few days after the talks were finally halted, Keir Starmer’s trade envoy Lord Austin visited Haifa “to promote trade with the UK”. That visit was celebrated by the British embassy in Israel and defended in parliament by Minister for the Middle East Hamish Falconer, who claimed it was somehow unfair of MPs to object to actively promoting trade with a state that was blocking food to 2.2 million people and massacring starving civilians at aid sites.
- Your government has refused to cancel the 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel Bilateral Relations, a formal agreement in which the UK promises to help Israel reduce UN scrutiny of its human rights abuses and promises to keep denying its practice of apartheid against Palestinians (thereby dismissing the finding that Israel practices apartheid by judges at the International Court of Justice and the strong consensus on this issue among the leading Palestinian, international and Israeli human rights NGOs).
Month after month, these indefensible policies have signalled to Israeli leaders – loud and clear – that they are free to keep shooting, bombing and starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, with no serious pushback from their friends in Westminster.
Meanwhile, Labour ministers have repeatedly ignored or deflected questions about their legal obligation – under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention – to take steps to prevent genocide in situations where there is a serious risk of this crime occurring.
Those who have explicitly described your government’s actions as amounting to complicity in genocide, or have otherwise sounded the alarm about your government violating its legal obligations and dragging the UK into culpability for atrocity crimes, include UN Special Rapporteurs, hundreds of UK lawyers including former supreme court judges, leading genocide experts, the British Palestinian Committee, and NGOs including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Friends of the Earth, War on Want, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. In legal advice commissioned by Global Justice Now, Sam Fowles of Cornerstone Barristers concluded there is a “real prospect” that UK ministers and/or civil servants “may have facilitated the commission of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity” and that it is possible some “could be vicariously liable for war crimes committed by Israeli personnel”.
To make matters even worse, Labour ministers and MPs have shown contempt for the victims of the Gaza genocide. In October 2024, David Lammy told parliament that to call Gaza a genocide undermines the seriousness of the term. To justify this outrageous statement, he falsely claimed that this word is conventionally only used to describe atrocities in which millions of people are killed. This contradicts the definition of genocide in international law and amounts to a denial of almost every genocide since the Holocaust; yet despite the widespread offence and alarm this caused, he refused to clarify or apologise. In February 2025, at a time when UN partner organisations were identifying thousands of cases of acute malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women, Starmer’s trade envoy to Israel Lord Austin denied that there was any malnutrition among Palestinians in Gaza. In a similar refusal to even acknowledge the abuses suffered by Palestinians, Labour officials banned the Palestine Solidarity Campaign from mentioning “apartheid” or “genocide” in the title of its fringe event at the 2024 party conference. This is despite judges at the International Court of Justice having warned months before that “all the indicators of genocidal activities are flashing red in Gaza” and having confirmed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
Meanwhile, Labour ministers and MPs have posed for photos of themselves embracing, smiling widely, laughing and clasping hands in poses of unity with Israeli politicians who have incited genocide against Palestinians. That includes photo ops featuring David Lammy and at least two separate delegations of Labour MPs (here and here) with Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who had earlier said there are no “uninvolved” (i.e. innocent) civilians in Gaza. It also includes Israeli minister Israel Katz, who declared that the entire civilian population in Gaza “will not receive a drop of water… until they leave the world”. He and Lammy were subsequently filmed together, embracing and laughing loudly.
In September 2024, Labour Friends of Israel hosted the Israeli politician Yair Golan as its guest of honour at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, where he met with ministers and posed for smiling photos with Labour MPs (e.g. here and here). Golan has a record of using Palestinians as human shields during his time as a military officer. In October 2023, he publicly advocated blocking all aid into Gaza and telling the population they “can starve to death”.
(Statements attributed to all Israeli politicians above can be found in a dossier of evidence submitted to the UN Security Council by South Africa in May 2024, available here.)
In March 2025, following 18 months of atrocity crimes and after Israel declared a complete blockade on aid entering Gaza that intensified manmade mass starvation, the Israeli ambassador to the UK tweeted a photo of herself meeting with Labour’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle, both of them grinning widely.
It is unthinkable that these same Labour figures would conduct themselves similarly with any Palestinian who had called for harm against Israelis, let alone incited or defended genocide against them. The racist double standards are stark.
I believe in the equal worth of all human lives, including people of all ethnicities living in Israel and Palestine. It is extremely hard to see how anyone who stands by your government’s behaviour can claim to live by the same principle. As a constituent, I wish to make clear that I consider it indefensible for an MP to either justify or stay silent on your party’s conduct and its barbaric policies on Gaza.
I would be grateful if you could write to me and tell me: Do you support doing business as usual with a state that is perpetrating a genocide? Can you point to any specific, demonstrable steps that you personally have taken to hold your party leaders to account for the policies and conduct outlined in this letter?
Yours sincerely,
North Herts Palestine Solidarity Campaign 