News - Middle East: A Palestinian human rights organization has launched a groundbreaking legal effort in the United Kingdom to prosecute British citizens who fought in the Israeli army during Tel Aviv’s devastating two-year-plus war of genocide on Gaza.

According to The Guardian, lawyers working with the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) have filed a formal request to summon one identified British-Israeli individual to a UK magistrates’ court under laws that prohibit citizens from enlisting in a foreign army engaged in war against a state that maintains peaceful relations with the UK.

The ICJP, the daily reported on Thursday, said the case would test Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870, which criminalizes taking up arms for a foreign force fighting against a friendly nation.

The organization intends to argue that the Israeli regime’s war was not against Gaza’s Hamas resistance movement alone, but against the entire Palestinian population, pointing to the catastrophic civilian death toll, the deliberate bombing of homes and hospitals, and the systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The group maintains that Britain’s recent recognition of the State of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly strengthens its legal position, affirming Palestine’s sovereignty and peaceful diplomatic relations with London, both prerequisites for prosecuting such cases under the 19th-century law.

While only one summons has been formally requested so far, the ICJP says it has compiled evidence implicating more than 10 British nationals who participated in the brutal military assault on the coastal sliver.

The new case follows an earlier 240-page war crimes complaint filed in April with London’s Metropolitan Police by British human rights lawyers acting on behalf of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Centre.

That submission found UK-Israeli forces culpable of killing civilians and aid workers, forcibly displacing residents, and taking part in indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas.

The Israeli regime claims its forces have sought to “minimize” civilian casualties and alleges that Hamas “operated from densely-populated neighborhoods.”

Yet, Palestinian and international rights groups say the scope of destruction and the staggering number of deaths tell a verifiable different story.

Upwards of 62,800 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed since October 2023, when the genocide started.

The ICJP’s move signals a growing international push to hold Israeli military personnel and the regime’s foreign recruits accountable for war crimes.

Human rights advocates say it could open the door to unprecedented legal scrutiny of Western citizens who actively took part in the war, long shielded from accountability by political alliances and protected through political deniability.

A major contributor to such prosecution efforts has been the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), named after a young Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli forces in Gaza.

In October last year, the HRF filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court, seeking arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former minister for military affairs Yoav Gallant, and the entire 749-strong troops of the Israeli military’s Combat Engineering Battalion over war crimes in Gaza.

Source: Press TV