THE Metropolitan Police has said that it will not even investigate 10 British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza. More than 2,000 British citizens travelled to Israel to join the occupation’s military during the Gaza genocide, according to data released by the IDF. Many have since returned to Britain.

In April 2025, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Centre delivered a detailed, 240-page legal dossier of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed by 10 British citizens while fighting for the Israeli military in Gaza.

The dossier’s allegations include targeted killings of civilians and aid workers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, attacks on hospitals and protected sites and the forced transfer and displacement of civilians.

More than 70 legal and human rights experts supported the referral. The Metropolitan Police has declined to do anything with it.

In this decision, as it all too often does, the Metropolitan Police is not defending the rule of law. Instead, it is putting British authority — and Israeli colonialism — in a place of impunity. It is standing where empire always stands; between the evidence and the verdict, between privileged perpetrators and justice.

The Met’s decision, like the support for successive British governments for Israel’s occupation, apartheid and genocide, must be understood in this imperial context.

Imperial violence is rarely sustained by one perpetrator alone. It requires the soldier, the minister, the arms pipeline, the intelligence channel, the diplomatic cover and, at the end of the chain, the institution willing to say that no investigation will take place.

British law does provide routes for prosecution of grave international crimes committed abroad by British nationals or residents. More than that, it requires it: “The UK … has an obligation under international law to prosecute or extradite those suspected of war crimes or torture anywhere in the world.” Those words are from an official parliamentary briefing.

This obligation is codified in British law through the International Criminal Court Act 2001 and related war-crimes provisions. There is no credible dispute about whether Britain is legally obliged to hold such criminals accountable.

The only question is whether the authorities are willing to pursue it. And the answer to that question is: clearly not, at least in the case of Israel and its crimes against the Palestinians.

The Metropolitan Police has made clear that the British state has no interest in looking too closely at people who may be linked, by passport or politics, to a military campaign that human rights organisations and UN experts have associated with war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.

Imagine how different the reaction would be had 10 Muslim British nationals gone to assist in a foreign power’s genocide. In fact, it doesn’t need too much imagination.

Shamima Begum didn’t even go to fight when, as a child, she went to support Isis. But when she realised her mistake and tried to come home, the British government blocked her return and ultimately stripped her of her citizenship, even though she was born a British citizen.

British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah is facing repeated attempts by a pro-Israel pressure group to remove his medical licence because he has spoken out about Israel’s crimes that he witnessed working in Palestinian hospitals.

Now contrast that with the case of Dr Eastland Staveley. Staveley, when asked how many children he had killed while fighting for the occupation, he allegedly responded: “Not enough but I’m sure they can add two more.”

Staveley also called for the complete destruction of Gaza. He is still practising as a doctor in Leicester.

When British nationals can be publicly accused in a substantial legal dossier of involvement in grave crimes abroad and the institutional response is to decline an investigation, the signal is unmistakable. The law may be clear, but it is only applicable when the powers that be decide to apply it.

The message is unequivocal; the empire which once divided, occupied and extracted still recognises itself in the mirror and still protects its own

This is being baked even harder into the structures of state power.

In April 2026, media reports revealed that the Foreign Office had closed its in-house unit responsible for tracking potential Israeli breaches of international law. The closure would also cut off the government’s access to a database containing 26,000 verified incidents, adding to concerns about institutional withdrawal from accountability rather than movement toward it.

Effectively, the state is saying: “Evidence of Israel’s rampant crimes is abundant, so we’re going to put our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and shout ‘lalala’ until you stop going on about it.”

The only other — and the only right — response to such a mountain of evidence would be action.

As well as the massive death toll from the genocide, the UN-backed 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment estimates direct damage to Gaza’s physical infrastructure at about £26 billion up to the October 2025 ceasefire date. The destruction of housing alone amounted to £13.3 billion. Some 1.2 million people had lost their homes and over 1.9 million Palestinians had been forcibly displaced inside Gaza, many of them multiple times.

The same assessment said fewer than half of hospitals and less than 38 per cent of primary healthcare centres remained even partially functional.

It is clear, when imperial violence cannot defeat a people politically or militarily, it tries to erase the conditions of life itself.

Education and social reproduction have also been systematically shattered. By mid-2025, around 95 per cent of schools had sustained damage or destruction, according to a 2026 European Training Foundation report summarising Unicef data. Save the Children had earlier reported that 87.7 per cent of school buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Human Rights Watch’s 2026 world report was emphatic. The forced displacement and destruction amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The UN’s human rights office warned in February 2026 of ethnic cleansing linked to attacks and forced transfers in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich boasts openly that Gaza will be levelled and its people removed.

Britain continues to face accusations of complicity in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Through military links, surveillance support and the continued shipment of F-35 components, even after the export licence was supposedly partly suspended, the British government is actively supporting genocide.

The closure of the Foreign Office monitoring unit underlined Britain’s determination to enable Israel’s crimes and territorial ambitions.

The Metropolitan Police decision to grant impunity to individuals accused of direct involvement in those crimes is the poisonous cherry on that cake. With a British legal framework that obligates Britain to act, this is not incapacity, it is collusion.

Colonialism lives on. It takes land, then law, then language, then the future of its victims. And then it demands praise for its civility. The issue is not only Gaza, but the afterlife of empire in British institutions — self-evidently including British policing.

At a moment when the evidence of devastation in Gaza is overwhelming, these institutions are not merely failing to lead. They are at the heart of writing the script of denial.

The Metropolitan Police has not just declined 10 cases. In refusing to pursue them, it has chosen the rule of imperial protection above the law it is supposed to uphold and has illuminated the political anatomy of impunity in modern Britain.

Our response as civil society and as socialists must be decisive and principled: that international law cannot be selective, that anti-racism without anti-imperialism is theatre, and that peace without justice is only a pause in domination.

Claudia Webbe was the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.