By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

“The UK is profiting from war crimes. This can and must be stopped.”

Lawyers have submitted graphic testimonies of torture and denial of medical treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to London’s High Court in a bid to stop the UK government from issuing arms export licenses to British companies supplying weapons to Israel, the Guardian has reported.

The submission of more than 100 pages includes statements from 14 witnesses including Palestinian and Western medical doctors working in Gaza’s hospitals, as well as ambulance drivers, civil defense department workers and aid workers, the report said.

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The case has been brought by NGOs including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Human Rights Watch.

The evidence, the report said, was” designed to support a request for a court order that the UK government has acted irrationally in refusing to ban the sale of arms” to Israel.

The government had argued that there was “not a clear risk the weapons would be used to commit breaches of international humanitarian law,” the report added.

No Appropriate Medicines

One of the witness testimonies was from Dr Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, who said: “Every part of the healthcare system has been targeted and destroyed and is now completely incapable of providing care. So many people are dying from issues that are completely treatable.”

He said he had “treated a patient who had been forced to stand for 48 hours, requiring a skin graft on his heel,” the Guardian said.

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Thomson also said he had “personally treated three children whom he could have saved if he had any access to the appropriate medicines.”

He further testified that he was forced to reset bones without pain medication, and that a patient in his care had died “on the floor in a pool of his own blood and brain matter”.

‘Beaten in Detention’

Dr. Khaled Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College Hospital London, said many of his patients were victims of sniper fire, adding that conditions in hospitals on both his trips “were what he imagined medieval medicine must have been like”.

He said: “I understand that Israel justifies its attacks on hospitals by reference to its claim that the hospitals are overrun by militants but in my four weeks in al-Aqsa hospital I personally did not see a single one.”

The doctor also said, “he met many patients who had clearly been beaten in detention camps, and one patient who had been dragged along the ground by the external fixator holding his broken limb together.”

The case is “the first attempt” to place a “graphic testimony of alleged Israeli war crimes in front of a British judge,” the Guardian said.

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According to GLAN, the value of UK arms export licenses “reached a record high in 2022 with £8.5 billion in licenses issued. The UK have approved sales of lethal weapons to Israel’s military again and again.”

“The UK is profiting from war crimes. This can and must be stopped,” the organization said on its website.

Staggering Death Toll

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 40,139 Palestinians have been killed, and 92,743 wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

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Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety.

(The Palestine Chronicle)