The Genocide Convention imposes obligations on states and individuals not just to punish the crime of genocide but to actively prevent it. Two years into the war in Gaza and over 20 months since the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel’s actions there could violate the Convention, Carne Ross investigates the possibility that the British government and its officials are complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

 

During my former career as a British diplomat I headed the Israel/Palestine section of the Foreign Office and later led Middle East work in the UK Mission to the UN, where at the Security Council I negotiated scores of resolutions on the situation in Palestine, Libya and Iraq – including the 9/11 terror attacks  and the weapons inspections in and sanctions on Iraq before the 2003 invasion. I resigned from the FCO over the Iraq War after giving secret testimony about my work on weapons inspections and WMD in Iraq – and the government’s lies about them. 

I now want to talk about complicity in genocide and the very grave possibility that the British government and other Western governments are in fact complicit in the genocide that’s going on, right now, in Gaza. In particular, I want to talk about individual accountability – of our ministers and senior officials.

First, it is clear that Israel is committing genocide. Multiple legal experts have come to this conclusion, based on the explicit statements of Israeli leaders, ministers and military officials as who have made literally hundreds of declarations of genocidal intent.

And based on Israel’s conduct, which is also genocidal — the publicly-declared and deliberate starvation of the entire population of Gaza; the disproportionate killing of women and children, the denial of medical supplies, water, fuel and electricity, as well as the systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, bakeries and other civilian infrastructure; all evidence of the intent and conduct required to establish genocide.

The former British Supreme Court judge, Jonathan Sumption concluded that “the most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain. A court would be likely to regard that as genocide.”

The Israeli genocide scholar, and former member of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Omer Bartov, judged on the evidence that Israel is committing genocide – I know one when I see one, he said.

UN special rapporteurs and a UN Commission of Inquiry have reached the same conclusion, as have multiple authoritative orgs including Amnesty International and HRW. 

You can also look at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) preliminary opinion last year on South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel.  The ICJ issued binding orders on Israel to take certain measures to prevent acts of genocide and incitement of genocide.  These measures are obligatory under the Genocide Convention, to which Israel is a party. 

Israel has taken none of those measures, in fact the opposite. It has not, for instance, allowed the entry of the necessary humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. It has instead brazenly announced that it is withholding aid with the results that we can see today, where millions face deliberately-induced famine and scores are dying every day.

Aiding and abetting genocide

Israel is aided and abetted in these actions by other countries, above all the United States, but also countries like the UK, Germany, France and others, by supplying weapons and other military assistance.  The UK for instance, despite claiming that it will not supply weapons that might be used in war crimes, has continued to supply parts for F-35 aircraft, which are used to bomb Gaza, claiming, implausibly, that it cannot stop such exports which are made to a common ‘pool’.  This is nonsense. 

My suspicion is that the reason the UK doesn’t stop the supply of parts is because the US is the F-35’s lead manufacturer, and the UK doesn’t want to annoy the US.  David Lammy, British Foreign Secretary until last month, says that to stop supplying the parts would undermine the whole F-35 programme.  This too is obviously nonsense; of course the suppliers can stop sending parts to Israel. 

The UK announced late last year that it would stop licencing arms to Israel that ‘may be’ used in war crimes.  But Britain has stopped only 30 of around 350 licences for arms supplies to Israel. And since the announcement, official records show a surge in export licenses for military equipment and munitions included items specifically described in customs codes as ammunition, explosives, bombs, grenades, and similar ordnance. Between September 2024, when the partial suspension was announced, and March this year there is evidence from Israeli tax records that the UK has supplied over 8,000 individual munitions to Israel – bombs, missiles, mines.  The permits were signed off by officials and ministers sitting in Whitehall. 

Since Hamas’s murderous attack on 07 October 2023, the UK has conducted over 500 RAF military surveillance flights over Gaza. The government refuses to answer questions about these flights, although it has said in the past that they are used to gather intelligence to help locate Israeli and particularly British hostages. These flights continue today, even though no British hostages remain in Gaza. David Lammy has said they are not used to provide intelligence to the Israeli military and that this would be ‘wrong’ but the government itself has admitted that the detailed video filmed by these aircraft is shared with Israel. 

The claim that this intelligence is used only to help free hostages is not credible.

Individual complicity under the Genocide Convention

Complicity is a crime under the Genocide Convention (GC), agreed in 1948 in response to the mass atrocities committed by Nazi Germany before and during the Holocaust and the Second World War. It is a separate crime from genocide itself; it is a ‘grave crime’ and punishable under international law, even if the complicit actor does not share the genocidal intent of those committing the acts of genocide. 

Notably, The GC makes clear that its provisions apply not only to states, but to individuals.  The Nuremberg Tribunals had firmly established the principle of individual accountability and criminal responsibility, an important cornerstone of international law. 

Article 4 of the GC states that:

“Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III [which includes complicity] shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

This is right. I know from my experience that officials and ministers hide behind the protection of the state when doing terrible things, such as the sanctions that did immense harm to the Iraqi civilian population in the years before the 2003 invasion. I was part of that. No one has been held accountable. I remember thinking that even if the sanctions were illegal under international humanitarian law (IHL), nothing would happen to me, because I was an operative of the state. I am sure I would have questioned my actions more thoroughly had I feared that I might  be prosecuted.  I am today very ashamed of what I was part of. Many others, officials and now former ministers, are also culpable.

Culturally and in the media, it appears that those in government should be treated differently when they commit crimes, particularly those undertaken under the guise of ‘national security’. Tony Blair and his cohorts are given a platform, on national media, despite the fact that he launched an illegal and unnecessary war. That it was illegal and unnecessary is not just my view, and I worked on Iraq longer than almost any other British official at the time, it is also the view of every reputable international lawyer and the deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, who resigned when the government ignored her advice.

There are real consequences to such impunity. The invasion of Iraq cost an estimated 500,000 lives, it ignited violent extremism across that country and into Syria, creating ISIS and forcing out millions of refugees, whose arrival in Europe has triggered a surge in far right support across the continent. And of course other war criminals take their cue from witnessing such brazen illegality – the Russian foreign minister often cites the Iraq war when justifying Russia’s bloody and unlawful invasion of Ukraine.  The rule of law is undermined for all, across the world, with real consequences – namely, thousands – tens, hundreds of thousands – of dead civilians.

If you do terrible things when you’re in government, including abetting or even instigating war crimes, as Blair did, you are given a kind of free pass. At worst, you might have to testify years later to a toothless public inquiry, like those that followed long after the Iraq War, and to which I testified. But being in government when you take decisions about illegal invasions or sending weapons to those committing genocide should not be a free pass. And it is not, certainly in the case of genocide, as the GC makes very clear.

It is individuals – ministers and officials – who take the decisions to abet genocide. It also includes of course Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken, his Secretary of State, and also British, German and French ministers who chose to continue arms deliveries to Israel as it killed Palestinians in huge numbers, including, the UN told us in July, the equivalent of a classroom of children every single day, slaughter that cannot conceivably be justified as ‘self-defence’.

Some of those governments have since ‘condemned’ Israel’s actions in killing civilians trying to collect food in Gaza. Yet they continue to supply weapons and, in Britian’s case, intelligence gathered by the RAF. We don’t know what other intelligence they may be providing. Meanwhile, Israeli officers continue to be trained in the UK and Israeli aircraft stop over to refuel at RAF bases in the UK and on Cyprus. Imagine if Serbia was provided with intelligence by Britain as it conducted genocide in Bosnia? Or the military in Myanmar as they slaughtered tens of thousands of Rohingya civilians? That is what Britain is doing with Israel.

The obligation to prevent genocide

The GC also places a clear and binding obligation on its states parties to prevent genocide, to stop it. It is called The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. You will often hear government ministers say that it is for the courts to judge whether Israel is committing genocide, as if ordinary people cannot see what it is, and this means of course long after the event. But it is the obligation of signatories of the GC to do everything they can to stop genocide from happening in the first place, and it is a serious violation not to do so.

The US and UK and other Western countries could take many other actions to force Israel to stop its genocide. They could place sanctions on all of Israel’s leadership including its PM, not just the two far right extremists who sit in Israel’s cabinet. They could cut off trade. They could expel the Israeli ambassador. They could prosecute their citizens who fight for the IDF. They don’t do any of these things. They are not only failing to stop the genocide – they are helping it to continue, for two years now.

Instead, British ministers call Israel ‘an ally’, attend receptions given by Israel’s ambassador where they boast about Britain’s assistance to Israel, including those intelligence flights – this was in May, when 55,000 Palestinians had already been killed. Only on 20 May did the UK halt the negotiation of a new trade deal. While Israel has been indiscriminately bombing Palestinian civilians and laying Gaza to waste, and deliberately starving the Palestinian population, British ministers were happy to discuss with Israel how to increase trade with each other. In mid-July 2025, the head of Israel’s air force had talks with RAF chiefs at an air show in England – this is a man who ordered Israeli bombers returning from attacking Iran to offload any unused bombs on Gaza. 

Which signal do you think Israel will take seriously – the rhetoric or the weapons? The outraged chest-beating on TV news or the thousands of gigabytes of intelligence data secretly supplied to the IDF? The words of condemnation in parliament or the warm words of support at Israeli diplomatic receptions?

How will these individuals, such as Starmer, Lammy, Merz, Macron, Schultz or Baerbock, be held accountable for what they have done?  In theory, their national courts, which are obliged to implement the GC, should take it up. They have not. Indeed, the High Court in the UK recently ruled that arms sales to Israel were a ‘matter for the executive’ which is feeble and indeed wrong; ‘national security’ should not be a kind of all-embracing excuse. But if national courts fail to act, the ICC is empowered to investigate – the UK, France and Germany are all parties to the Rome Statute, which obliges them to enforce the ICC’s arrest warrants.

The British government, like the German or French, makes a big deal about how they stand up for international rule of law, and they boast about their support for institutions like the ICJ and ICC. Britain was central in the negotiation of the Rome Statute which created the ICC – in fact, Britain’s main negotiator was the legal adviser who advised that the Invasion of Iraq was illegal. British judges and lawyers played a very full part in prosecuting genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and in prosecuting war criminals in those places.

The law is clear, and you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand it – I know it when I see it, as Dr Omer Bartov put it. Killing children in the tens of thousands, shooting some in the head, burning others to death, deliberately starving all of them, is not self-defence by any definition. Deliberately denying food, water, and medical supplies to an entire population is a clear breach of the Genocide Convention and, more specifically and recently, a clear breach of the specific and explicit obligations upon Israel ordered by the ICJ to prevent genocide. 

The GC could not be more clear – it is obligatory to do everything you can to prevent genocide – our ministers did not even try do so, they aided and abetted it. It is obligatory to do everything you can to stop genocide when it takes place – our ministers did not try to stop it. What is providing weapons, intelligence and political support to those committing genocide? it is complicity; complicity is a crime.

I hope that for the sake of the two million innocent civilians in Gaza – nearly half of them children – and for the sake of victims of other future genocides, the ICC and ICJ uphold the Geneva Conventions and the GC to the fullest extent. Abetting genocide is a grave crime and the individuals who were complicit must be held accountable, not to some insipid inquiry years down the line, to press questions that are not directly and honestly answered, but to the law.

Carne Ross is a leader, writer and strategist who has pioneered change in the world of diplomacy and has led and written about political change across the world. He served in the UK Foreign Office for fifteen years, including as Britain’s Iraq expert at the UN from 1997-2002, before resigning after giving secret evidence to the first official inquiry into the 2003 Iraq War. As founder and Executive Director (2004-2020) of Independent Diplomat, he advised leaders of democratic countries and political groups all over the world, including on conflict and climate change. He now advises multiple organisations and political causes around the world on how to change the system.

This article is an updated transcript of a videoed talk first released on his own Blog on 24 July 2025.