Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy gives a press conference in Abuja on 4 November, 2024 (AFP/Kola Sulaimon)
Scottish National Party MP Chris Law accuses David Lammy of exposing UK to ‘significant risk’
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has been warned that the UK as a state, “alongside individual ministers and government officials as individuals”, is at “significant risk of future legal action for complicity in acts of genocide”.
In a letter to Lammy on Monday, seen by Middle East Eye, Scottish National Party MP Chris Law accused the foreign secretary of failing to “demonstrate any responsibility of the UK government to prevent genocide”.
“Do you accept that the UK’s obligations [under the Genocide Convention] should have been triggered from the moment the government became aware of a serious and imminent risk that genocide could be perpetrated,” Law asks in the letter.
The Scottish politician goes on to accuse the foreign secretary of appearing to “diminish the very definition of genocide”, after Lammy suggested last month in parliament that Israel’s actions in Gaza do not constitute genocide because fewer than millions of people have been killed.
Lammy said that terms like genocide “were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term.”
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the United Kingdom are actively participating in Israel’s genocides, war crimes, Neo-Fascism.
Fascists Mussolini and Hitler salute Keir Starmer and the Labour Party
What can be done? Ideally, those responsible including of course Starmer and Lammy would be prosecuted, convicted and punished. It’s likely that the British police can start that process but I somehow doubt that it will happen. There’s little doubt that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed: starvation, civilians including healthcare workers, journalists, aid workers are targeted, health facilities targeted, starvation, disease and forced displacements used as weapons of war. These are the crimes that German Nazi Fascists committed during WW2.
We shouldn’t allow normal functioning while our government is engaged in genocide. That would take commitment from many people. This is the correct course of course and our recent ancestors fought such Fascists and Fascism FFS.
Starmer and Lammy represent the Labour Party of course and act in the name of the Labour Party. There may be some leverage here. The Labour Party under Starmer is already hugely unpopular. It should be history now that it’s a Fascist Zionist party.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, is treated by colleagues for his injuries following an Israeli strike that hit the medical compound in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on November 23, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
“These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work,” said a Gaza hospital director injured in an Israeli strike.
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Sunday.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last functioning in northern Gaza, has been injured in an apparent Israeli strike.
Safiya has refused to close Kamal Adwan despite Israeli strikes and raids, one of which killed his 15-year-old son. https://t.co/QHOHWWiPbj
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according to Al Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Israel—which has been armed by the Biden administration and bipartisan U.S. Congress—faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza. Additionally, the International Criminal Court earlier this week issued arrest warrants for Israel’s current prime minister and former defense minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Last month, 99 U.S. healthcare providers who have volunteered in Gaza since last fall sent U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a letter detailing “the massive human toll from Israel’s attack” and urging them to “end this madness now!”
“It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” the Americans wrote. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
“We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world,” they continued. “All were acutely aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them as targets for Israel. This makes a mockery of the protected status hospitals and healthcare providers are granted under the oldest and most widely accepted provisions of international humanitarian law.”
They added that “we wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities. We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.”
Despite such appeals and accounts, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration has declined to cut off weapons to the Israeli government and earlier this week most U.S. senators from both major parties rejected a trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have blocked some American arms sales to Israel.