Labour Party members have voted to accept that a genocide is taking place in Gaza by Israel – putting pressure on the government to also do so.
Members voted to approve an emergency motion at Labour’s conference to accept the findings of the UN commission of inquiry, which nearly two weeks ago concluded Israel “has committed genocide”.
Israel has repeatedly denied this and called the report “distorted and false”.
The vote will place further pressure on the government after Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers have refused to declare a genocide is taking place.
They have argued that the issue is a matter for the courts, with Israel fighting a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in which the country is accused of genocide.
Speaking after the conference vote, which was heavily backed by the unions, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy reiterated that position, saying he believed in “the rules-based order”.
“That means that it must be for the ICJ with their judges and judiciary, and for the ICC, to determine the issue of genocide in relation to the convention, it is not for politicians like me to do that,” he said.
“But it is for the public to look at what they see and come to their own judgments about what they see.”
He added that last year, when he was foreign secretary, he had decided “that I did see a clear risk that Israel was breaching international humanitarian law” and had suspended arms sales to Israel.
The Jewish Labour Movement group said it is “hugely disappointed” about the vote, which it credited to “union votes”, and said it neglected to mention October 7th or Hamas “and barely pays lip service to the 48 hostages held by terrorists in Gaza”.
It said the motion “is not the route to the two-state solution” and urged the government to “continue to pursue a path of peace for all Israelis and Palestinians”.
Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, who was foreign secretary until recently, said it was for the courts to decide
After the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released its report, the UK government said its official position is that it “has not concluded that Israel is acting with that [genocidal] intent”.
The report found there are reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law have been carried out since the start of the war with Hamas in 2023.
They are: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group, and preventing births.
Although other UN bodies and personnel have previously linked Israel’s actions with allegations of genocide, it was the first time any UN body has claimed to have made a definitive judgement.
The world’s leading association of genocide scholars, as well as several Israeli human rights organisations, had already accused the country of genocide before the UN commission report.
