UK Middle East minister dismissed Gaza genocide concerns as obnoxious

The UK’s Middle East minister dismissed concerns that a genocide was unfolding in Gaza as “obnoxious and hideous” during a fraught meeting with humanitarian organisations last year, it has been revealed.

The minister, Andrew Mitchell, is said to have been on his phone for most of the session, which was also attended by then-foreign secretary David Cameron, and left a prominent British surgeon who had just returned from working in Gaza feeling he had been part of “tick-box exercise”.

Professor Nick Maynard, who relayed his experiences in evidence to the High Court as part of the legal challenge brought over UK arms exports to Israel, said he had brought laminated photos of injured children to try to get his point across, but to no avail.

“I had a very limited time to speak, but there was no question that the foreign secretary was given the information detailing the indiscriminate mutilation and killing of children in Gaza,” he wrote in a witness statement of the February 2024 meeting.

“I left the meeting with no confidence that the information would be acted upon, and in my view the information we gave them was ignored.”

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Mitchell has declined to comment on Maynard's account. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office has been approached for comment.

First-hand accounts

Fifteen months later, Maynard’s testimony and those of other British healthcare workers who have worked in Gaza were read aloud in front of the High Court on Friday morning.

It was the fourth and final day of the judicial review to decide whether British ministers have acted lawfully by continuing to supply UK-made F-35 parts that could end up in Israeli fighter jets.

Mitchell and Cameron were foreign office ministers in the previous Conservative government, which was in office before the current Labour government’s general election victory last July.

'The foreign secretary was given the information detailing the indiscriminate mutilation and killing of children in Gaza'

- Nick Maynard, British surgeon 

The Labour government in September suspended about 30 arms export licences over concerns that weapons supplied by the UK could be used in violation of international humanitarian law.

But F-35 fighter jet components, which British companies supply to a global spare parts pool, were partially exempted, with the government citing national security concerns.

Campaigners argue the exemption means that British-made components could still end up in Israeli jets indirectly through the global pool, and has left the government in breach of its domestic and international obligations.

Doctors who spoke outside the court said that, like Maynard, they feel that the first-hand evidence they have provided on their return from missions to Gaza have been ignored by successive British governments.

Their slow-boiling concern became acute this week when it emerged in court documents that the government had assessed in June 2024 that there was no evidence that Israel was deliberately targeting civilian women or children.

The assessment, made by the Export Control Joint Unit, a cross-departmental body overseeing UK export controls and licensing for military items, cited in court documents said: “There is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians.”

Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a British-Egyptian paediatric neurologist and founder of Health Workers for Palestine, said he felt compelled to speak up as a healthcare worker who had been to Gaza.

“Eighteen months in, we are watching exactly the same systematic targeting of civilians, of health workers, of women, children and men in Gaza,” he said.

“These are human beings. We talk about their endurance. We talk about their steadfastness, but these are human beings. They can only endure so much. Sadly, they have been dehumanised.”

Dr James Smith, an emergency physician in London who worked in Gaza for over two months, also challenged the government’s implication that Israel had not targeted Palestinian civilians.

“What then happens when you bomb hospitals, schools, bakeries and displaced person camps?” he said.

“What happens when you force 2.1 million people into ever-shrinking so-called safe zones only to besiege and bomb those places too?”

Smith read out testimony which has been provided to the court by Dr Mark Perlmutter, a US-based orthopaedic surgeon who worked in Gaza.

“All of the disasters I’ve seen, all of them combined, do not equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza,” Perlmutter told the court.

'These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately'

- Dr Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic surgeon 

Perlmutter said he treated many children who had been shot, some of them multiple times.

“For example, I evaluated two children that were snipered twice each. Both received central chest wounds and side of the head wounds which meant the child was shot a second time after they died and probably were already on the ground,” he testified.

"These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.”

Perlmutter also told the court that he had treated multiple pre-teen children with gunshot wounds to the head, including some who were eight or nine years old.

“Most of the children shot in the head died slowly. Their families told us they had been shot by Israeli forces while playing inside or in the streets.”

After reading Perlmutter’s testimony, Smith himself shared how he had held Palestinian children “whose arms and legs have been blown apart by Israeli missiles”.

“I was by the side of a Palestinian infant no older than one-year of age as he died of an injury inflicted by an Israeli strike,” he said.

“My colleague and I could do nothing for him but wrap him in a blanket as he died alone on a floor.”

'Wishful blindness'

Gearoid O Cuinn, director of the UK-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), one of the groups who have brought the challenge to the court, say the government’s claim that it has seen no evidence of the targeting of women and children is “wishful blindness”.

Specifically, he said on Friday that the government had submitted a document to the court entitled ‘Research report: long range shootings and shootings of minors’ but has refused to share it with GLAN without citing why it has been withheld.

“This is the only legal mechanism that we have. It’s painfully slow and it’s technical and we are not given all the information. We are fighting with our hand tied behind our back,” he said.

The Department for Business and Trade, the government department that is being challenged in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the document. 

A ruling is expected in the challenge in the coming months.

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