A Palestinian rights group has launched an unusual bid to prosecute British citizens who served in the IDF during Israel’s two-year war against Hamas under a law governing enlistment into foreign armies, The Guardian reported Thursday.
As part of the effort, lawyers on Monday lodged a formal request to summon a named individual to a UK magistrates’ court, seeking to file charges against him.
The International Center for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) plans to argue that the individuals violated a UK law forbidding citizens from warring alongside a foreign force against a country that maintains peaceful relations with the British government.
The group alleges that Israel’s war in Gaza — rather than targeting Hamas — was waged against all Palestinians and Palestine as a whole, citing the war’s high civilian death toll and Israeli bombardment of civilian infrastructure, which left swaths of the enclave in ruins.
The British government formally recognized Palestine as a sovereign state in September, during the United Nations General Assembly, in a major shift in the UK’s policy in the region. It said, however, that Hamas — a proscribed group in the UK — can play no part in governing a future Palestinian state.
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So far, the ICJP has only requested a summons for one individual, but claimed it gathered evidence against more than 10 British citizens. It declined to name them, however, in an apparent attempt to boost the chances of a successful prosecution.
Under Section 4 of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act, it is an offense for any person to accept a commission for the military of a foreign state at war with another state that is at peace with the UK.
The group will have to show that the defendant, a British subject, accepted a commission in the IDF. They also must prove that Palestine is a sovereign state that both maintains peaceful relations with the UK and went to war with Israel.
The summons this week came months after British human rights lawyers filed a 240-page war crimes complaint with London police against 10 UK citizens who had served in the IDF.
The lawyers, working on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights and British-based Public Interest Law Center, requested in April that London’s Metropolitan Police war crimes unit probe the individuals.
A general view of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police, on February 3, 2012. (Alastair Grant/AP/File)
Rather than prosecuting individuals under the Foreign Enlistment Act, lawyers cut to the chase and accused the soldiers of killing civilians and aid workers by sniper fire, displacing civilians and partaking in indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, The Guardian reported at the time.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Nevertheless, many pro-Palestinian groups have undertaken a global effort to prosecute IDF soldiers for alleged war crimes. Some soldiers have been warned by the military not to travel or told to immediately return from their destinations due to a risk of being arrested.
The two-year war, which came to a halt in October after a fragile ceasefire took effect, erupted when Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages to Gaza.
Israel launched the offensive in Gaza to eliminate the terror group and bring back the captives.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 66,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Michael Horovitz contributed to this report.
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