THE findings of the Gaza Tribunal report, released on Monday, left no doubt, if ever there was any, about the complicit role of British officials and government ministers in Israeli war crimes as it carries out a genocide in Gaza.

The Tribunal, which took place last September 4 and 5, was initiated by now Your Party and then independent MP Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project after Corbyn’s effort to introduce a private member’s Bill last July was predictably blocked.

Over two riveting days, the Tribunal panel, consisting of Corbyn alongside academics Dr Shadh Hammouri and Professor Neve Gordon, heard compelling testimony from Gaza genocide survivors, witnesses and whistleblowers including doctors, journalists, academics, and high profile human rights UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

As Corbyn pointed out during Monday’s press conference, the British government was found to be not only complicit in genocide but had clearly, and worse still, knowingly, crossed “over the line into active participation.”

The report’s findings will be delivered to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and are publicly available on the Tribunal website. Among its many recommendations, the report urges the British government to “co-operate with a full, official, independent public inquiry into any co-operation between the UK and Israel since October 2023. This inquiry must have the power to question ministers and officials involved in the decision-making processes.”

Among the challenges now faced by the Tribunal’s findings, aside from the likelihood that British ministers will avoid and even evade immediate accountability, is the public perception that, with the report concluded and an apparent — but manifestly corrupt — Gaza peace plan in place, the genocide there is somehow over.

As Corbyn pointed out on Monday, “People are still living in tents, still living in tents in Gaza with no running water, no electricity and surrounded by sewage. Just think about that.”

But the eyes of the world — driven by the single-issue focus of the mainstream media — have turned elsewhere. How then, to use the Gaza Tribunal Report, as a living document, rather than just a historical record, and as a tool for change with which to drive an end to the Gaza genocide?

“The report is a tool for collective action and what we’re asking the public to do each in their own way, where they live, is to create stories of resistance to what is going on and use this as a tool for creating these stories of resistance,” responded Gordon, an Israeli professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London.

“Slowly these stories of resistance will connect together into this massive resistance and that will stop the genocide. If we don’t do that, genocide will be normalised.”

Added Corbyn, “This report is our weapon for peace, it’s our weapon for accountability. It’s our weapon to make sure that the establishment in Britain understands we’re watching them.”

It is also a reminder, pointed out Hammouri, a Palestinian/Jordanian lecturer in international law and legal theory at Kent Law School, that “We’ve crossed the threshold where it’s alright to open the news and look at that and say that this is normal.”

Crossing that line, she said, should shake us to the core, as the Tribunal findings did, raising alarming questions about what has happened to our humanity if we simply shrug and look away while Palestinians continue to suffer erasure in Gaza.

“Imagine what happens to someone’s psyche after knowing their acts directly led to shredded bodies of children hanging from buildings, to parents holding the parts of their children in plastic bags?” Hammouri asked. “To a whole population starving at the brink of famine. What happens to one’s psyche when they know they contributed to that and yet they go on unaccountable?”

“That is the level of depravity we are speaking about in this report,” she added. “In our hands we have evidence that British officials knowingly hid the truth, distorted the truth.”

Accountability may be the hardest of the report’s goals to achieve, given the disdain manifested by the Gaza genocide’s lead perpetrators —Israel and the United States — and their chief conspirators — Britain and Germany — for the authority of the ICC and the International Court of Justice.

And there is further concern, as Israel, backed by the US and abetted by Britain, extends its aggression across the region with attacks on Iran and Lebanon. Israel has also increased its already high levels of violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank. By this September, a new tribunal may be necessary, to examine these further atrocities and the clear complicity and participation once again of the British government.

Yet, as Gordon pointed out, Israel appears to be proud of its expansionism, a strategy that will continue unfettered with the support of the West.

“Critics have charged that Israel is now extending the Gaza doctrine to Lebanon,” he said. “Surprisingly or not, Israel has embraced this accusation, dropping leaflets on Beirut depicting Gaza as a success story and threatening Gaza-scale devastation in Lebanon.”

The combined Israeli assaults on Gaza, Iran and Lebanon have led to mass displacement, Gordon said, amounting to at least six million people. “Without accountability, without ensuring government officials and ministers assume responsibility for the crimes they have facilitated, the same or similar crimes will continue to be committed,” he said.

Today, all eyes need to be not only on Gaza but on Iran and Lebanon too, along with the other often forgotten genocides in Congo and Sudan, expunged from the news pages due to similar delusions about ceasefire agreements that have turned out to be anything but.

This makes the key finding of the report the most important springboard for change and accountability.

“I think it’s important to note that the British government knew it was acting illegally because what came out in the testimonies, particularly from the whistleblowers, is that Keir Starmer and his government have instituted a culture of deception,” Gordon said, “and this culture of deception is a cover-up for illegal actions, particularly the ongoing trade of weapons with Israel as it was carrying out the genocide. And I think this is not going away because of the whistleblowers, because of the courageous people that came out from the inside and have exposed the government.”

What this also means is an end to the false narrative in all of these conflicts, that Britain’s role is somehow only to support “defensive” actions.

“To start with the idea that Britain will only engage in something that is defensive rather than offensive, there’s nothing really in law that is capable of telling you when you start as defensive and enter the offensive in an illegal aggression,” said Hammouri. “There is no line to be drawn.”

The story of the Gaza genocide is of course not only about bombs, guns and tanks. Everything else has been weaponised too, as Israel continues to deprive the Palestinian population there of the essentials for a healthy life.

Few doctors are allowed to enter Gaza. Humanitarian aid is trickling in too slowly and in far too limited supply. Most of the infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, has been destroyed. There is scant access to electricity or clean water. Reporting is still limited. And, as Corbyn pointed out, “the Gaza siege has weaponised food which is of course a war crime in itself.”

Those war crimes have now extended to Iran, and yet the British government appears to be deploying the same playbook of denial.

“You read in the morning headline that Keir Starmer is sending mine-sweeping drones to Iran and two hours later you read a headline that the UK government is not going to intervene in Iran,” said Gordon. “Which one is true? We don’t know. What we know is there is a culture of duplicity, a culture of deception, that he’s lying to the public, that he’s lying to everyone around him, and we want the British government to be accountable.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the author of No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.