Burnham must establish an inquiry into Britain’s role in the Gaza genocide

Professor in the school of law at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.

History does not really repeat itself, but, as the saying frequently attributed to Mark Twain goes, it often rhymes. Take, for example, Britain’s involvement in the Middle East since the turn of the century. It took six years before the British government established an independent committee of Privy Counsellors to examine the United Kingdom’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war, and an additional seven years before Sir John Chilcot and other members of the inquiry committee published their damning findings that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had misled the public and his own government.

The Inquiry found that the UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted, that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, pose an imminent threat and that Blair had deliberately exaggerated the danger and then promised former United States President George Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” It also found that Britain’s intelligence agencies had produced “flawed information”, that Blair had ignored warnings about what would happen in Iraq after the invasion, and that the government had not tried hard enough to keep a tally of Iraqi civilian casualties, which, according to Iraq Body Count, amounts to between 187,499 and 211,046 deaths.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown would not have established the inquiry committee without unrelenting pressure from within Parliament and civil society, and it was only due to these persistent demands that the truth finally saw the light of day (even though Tony Blair has still not been held to account).

Fast forward to the Gaza genocide. In June 2025, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed a bill for a full, independent, public inquiry into Britain’s role in the genocide in Gaza. This inquiry committee would consider any UK military, economic or political cooperation with Israel since October 2023, including the sale, supply or use of weapons, surveillance aircraft and Royal Air Force bases, while also having the power to question ministers and officials about decisions taken in relation to UK involvement.

The bill secured the support of more than 50 MPs. However, when it reached a second reading, Keir Starmer’s government blocked its passage. The government said “there is no need for an inquiry” and that “such an inquiry would be unnecessary as there is no confusion about UK military operations in Gaza.”

In response, Jeremy Corbyn decided to hold a public tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal organised by the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1966 to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam. Corbyn invited Shahd Hammouri, an international law lecturer at the University of Kent, and me to join the Tribunal panel, and the hearings were held on September 4-5, 2025, in Church House, Westminster.

We heard 29 testimonies from witnesses, journalists and survivors of the Gaza genocide, as well as a range of international law experts, lawyers, medical doctors and whistleblowers. At the time, the official death toll in Gaza was nearing 65,000, of whom almost 20,000 were children. With more than 150,000 injured, Gaza had become the home of the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. Almost 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza had either been damaged or destroyed, including more than 90 percent of housing, 97 percent of schools, 33 of 36 hospitals, and every single university in the Strip.