Occupied Palestinian Territories: Genocide Risk Assessment

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

All of us are here in this Chamber because of the horror we have at the events of 7 October, and the atrocities that have taken place thereafter and that continue to take place. Many of us are also here because of a profound sense of shame—shame at the way the last Government and this Government have conducted themselves throughout this entire affair. Among the many shames that we will all have to bear is the Government’s reluctance to vigorously and assertively participate in the international rules-based order which we built to prevent exactly this kind of eventuality.

As other Members have said, I do not understand what the Government think the ICJ was doing when it ruled that there was a plausible case for genocide. Did they not think that it was triggering exactly the obligations that other Members have mentioned? Those obligations are not rhetorical; they are operational, real, obligatory. We have to act to prevent; we cannot facilitate. Yet time and again, the British Government have done absolutely nothing. From arms to intelligence sharing and diplomatic cover, we have continued as normal.

I am left wondering what it is this country stands for, because it is not just on this obligation that there has been nothing. On the torture convention, even when the reputable Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has just published a report saying that Israel is running

“a network of torture camps”,

there has been nothing from the British Government, notwithstanding their international obligations. On the settlements in the west bank, a hundred parliamentarians wrote to the Government and the ICJ has ruled, yet the Government have done the bare minimum they could get away with to enforce those obligations. There are even the individual cases we have seen on our telephones and on social media: Dr Adnan al-Bursh tortured to death; Hind Rajab, who the world heard as she lay dying in a car, left alone at the age of six; the ambulances ambushed; the hospitals flattened; the schools crushed. Even when British citizens are slaughtered—surely we have an obligation to them if we do not feel that we have one to anybody else—the Government have done nothing. This is a monstrous abdication of duty.

In this regard, the law is not unclear. The facts are not hidden. Daily, we hear Israeli Ministers boasting about what is being done in Gaza. What is missing is political will. It is about time that the Minister and his superiors realised that history does not just judge what Governments do; it judges what they allow.