Occupied Palestinian Territories: Genocide Risk Assessment

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber) (SNP) [R]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the obligation to assess the risk of genocide under international law in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and may I put on record my thanks to the Speaker’s Office for working so hard to ensure that we have time for the debate this afternoon? Given the pressure on time, and in order to allow as many Back-Bench speeches as possible, I will not take any interventions.

In his book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”, the Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad wrote:

“The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

That question will have to be answered. That may not be today or even this year, but at some point all of us, particularly those who hold positions of power or have a public platform, will have to answer that fundamental question: which side were we on? Were we on the side of justice, or did we side with the powerful?

When asked, each of us will have to answer: did we speak up for the tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children who were killed; did we use our platform to actively oppose the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians from their homes and communities as they were reduced to rubble, and condemn unequivocally the collective punishment imposed on an entire population when the basics necessary to sustain life—water, electricity, food and medicine—were deliberately withheld from them; or did we, either by what we said and did, or by what we did not say and did not do, side with the powerful, look away because it was in our political or financial interests so to do, and give political cover and legitimacy to the Netanyahu regime as it carried out its genocide while our Government supplied it with the weapons and military intelligence to do so?

The Hamas attack of 7 October was utterly appalling, and no right-thinking person could excuse or condone what happened that day. Neither, however, could any right-thinking person excuse or condone the Israeli response, which has been not just disproportionate, but brutal and relentless. Israel’s response has been carried out in such a systematic manner that, in my opinion, no reasonable person could deny that what we have witnessed in Gaza over the past two and a half years constitutes genocide.

The Government have denied, and continue to this day to deny, that it is a genocide. It is a decision that the Government will have to explain, and with which they will have to live. Today, however, I am not here to play ping-pong with the Government on the legal definition of what does and does not constitute genocide.

Instead, I want to focus on the mountain of evidence that says there is at least a serious risk of genocide occurring, and that serious risk should have triggered the UK’s legal obligation to act under the terms of the genocide convention, as explained by the International Court of Justice in its 2007 Bosnia ruling—an obligation that comes into effect long before any determination of genocide has been made by a court. The standard of serious risk is designed to be an early warning that ensures that states and international bodies act to prevent a genocide from occurring. In the case of the Palestinian people of Gaza, the UK has clearly and undeniably failed abjectly to meet its legal responsibility when alerted to there being a serious risk of genocide.

When the UK signed the genocide convention in 1948, it promised to prevent and punish this most heinous of crimes. Now, with more 71,000 people dead and 200,000 people injured, Gaza reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland, its population in the grip of a man-made famine and its medical infrastructure obliterated, hundreds of journalists murdered, water and electricity used as a means of coercion and punishment, food and medicine denied to the starving and the dying and the repeated forced displacement of millions of civilians, it is surely beyond any dispute that the minimum requirement for the UK to act to prevent and punish the crime of genocide has been met.

Arguably the most damning indictment, however, is that more than 21,000 children have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces since October 2023. Let us not forget that in November 2023 the UK Government formally intervened in the case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar at the ICJ to argue for changes to the definition of genocide that included lowering the threshold when damage was inflicted on children. If it is appropriate for the UK to intervene to protect children from the bombs and bullets of the Myanmar military, why is it not appropriate for it to intervene to protect Palestinian children from the bombs and bullets of the IDF?

Of course, genocide is not and never has been about numbers. The numbers killed, while shocking, do not in and of themselves necessarily prove genocide; there are other methods, including

“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

That is why it is important that we look at what else has happened in Gaza since October 2023. Over the past two and a half years, Israel has obliterated the agricultural sector; the fishing industry has gone; the road network has been wrecked; agricultural wells have been demolished; most crop land and greenhouses have been rendered unusable; the vast majority of livestock have been killed; and the vitally important and culturally significant olive tree crops have been targeted and destroyed.

Such is the devastation that a Guardian journalist on board a Jordanian air force plane wrote:

“Seen from the air, Gaza looks like the ruins of an ancient civilisation.”

And he added that Gaza was razed by an Israeli military campaign that has left behind a place that looks like the aftermath of an apocalypse. That does not happen by accident, and it is impossible to view this as anything other than a premeditated attempt to erase Palestinians from their land by making it impossible for human life to survive.

By any measure, collectively, all of that constitutes unimpeachable evidence that there has been a serious risk of genocide. And that should have triggered a UK Government response to prevent that becoming a full-blown genocide, but is has not. It is not as if the Government can say that they did not know or that they were unaware, because, time and again, statements made from that Dispatch Box, including from the former Foreign Secretary and the current Prime Minister, have conceded that they knew exactly what was happening, but they have chosen to do nothing about it. They have accepted and have publicly condemned the siege tactics, the denial of humanitarian assistance, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the use of evacuation orders, the denial of water, food and electricity, the targeting of journalists, the destruction of healthcare, the astronomical number of civilian casualties, and the deliberate dehumanising of the Palestinian people.

In their own words, the Government have denied undeniable proof that war crimes are being carried out, that mass atrocities are being carried out, and that civilians are being denied the basics to maintain life. A quick trawl of Hansard will reveal that as far back as January 2024, the then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), said that

“85% of the population are displaced and millions face the risk of famine.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2024; Vol. 744, c. 622.]

Two months later he said that

“famine in Gaza is imminent... but what distinguishes the horror in Gaza from what has come before is that is it not driven by drought or natural disaster; it is man-made.”—[Official Report, 19 March 2024; Vol. 747, c. 806.]

And in May 2024 he said that

“aid is reportedly being blocked and northern Gaza is now in full blown famine”.—[Official Report, 7 May 2024; Vol. 749, c. 443.]

A year later, in May of 2025, he openly acknowledged Israeli war crimes against the civilian population when he said:

“The whole House should be able to utterly condemn the Israeli Government’s denial of food to hungry children. It is wrong. It is appalling.”—[Official Report, 20 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 927.]

And then he continued that

“what we are seeing is inhumane, it is deadly and it is depriving Gazans of their human dignity.—[Official Report, 21 July 2025; Vol. 771, c. 662.]

It is there in black and white. The Government have acknowledged it. And the Prime Minister, when he was Leader of the Opposition in October of 2023, acknowledged that serious risk, saying:

“Civilians must not be targeted. Where Palestinians are forced to flee, they must not be permanently displaced… International law is clear. It also means that basic services, including water, electricity and the fuel needed for it, cannot be denied.—[Official Report, 23 October 2023; Vol. 738, c. 593.]

And as Prime Minister he said:

“We continue to see mounting evidence of appalling atrocities against civilians and unacceptable restrictions on humanitarian access.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 806.]

There are so many more examples of the Prime Minister, the former Foreign Secretary and other Ministers admitting from that Dispatch Box that Israel was using food as a weapon of war, that it had manufactured a famine, that it was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, that it was committing war crimes, and that it was stripping Gazans of their human dignity. Yet it remains the official position of the UK Government that none of that—none of it—meets the threshold for there being a serious risk of genocide.

I ask the Minister whether we are being asked to believe that, even when the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.

Did that not trigger within the Government the thought that perhaps there was a serious risk of genocide? Finance Minister Smotrich said:

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed; civilians will be sent to...the south…and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”

Did that not trigger the thought that, perhaps, there was a potential risk of genocide occurring? The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said:

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”.

Did that not suggest to the UK Government that perhaps Israel’s response to the atrocities of 7 October was going to be disproportionate, brutal and illegal; and that continuing to sell weapons and maintaining a “business as usual” relationship with Tel Aviv might put us in grave danger of breaching our obligations under the genocide convention?

Despite Israel making its intentions unambiguously clear from the very start—that it was going to ethnically cleanse Gaza, would do so using whatever means necessarily and would do so indiscriminately—it appears that the UK Government made the political choice to deliberately ignore their obligations so that they could continue a business-as-usual relationship with Netanyahu’s Government.

I will finish where I began, with that powerful quote from Omar El Akkad:

“When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

This UK Government and the Government who preceded them have chosen to side with power over justice, and history will judge them accordingly.

[Several hon. Members rose—]