This briefing was written for the February 2026 Backbench Business Debate on genocide prevention. It explores the UK’s duty to prevent genocide as it relates to events in Gaza.
Summary
Israel’s genocide has devastated Gaza to an unrecognisable state, leaving behind a landscape of rubble, deprivation and death. Genocide has rarely been so extensively documented yet so routinely dismissed and denied by political actors as in the case of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Egregious violations of international law, left unchecked by the international community, have entrenched Israel’s impunity and enabled the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The mass killing of civilians, forced displacement and destruction of the conditions necessary for life have been selectively addressed, and ignored or instrumentalised for political gain, with Palestinian suffering treated as expendable.
Repeatedly vague and hollow attempts by Western leaders to bring peace have failed to centre Palestinian voices or confront the root causes of the violence. So-called peace proposals and ceasefire initiatives, including those advanced under the Trump administration, obscure rather than challenge Israel’s decades-long occupation and conduct, leaving intact the conditions that allow Israeli aggression to be repeated without accountability or deterrence.
The UK has a positive obligation to prevent and punish genocide beyond its territorial borders. Not only must it ensure it is not complicit in genocidal acts, but it must also ‘employ all means reasonably available to them, so as to prevent genocide so far as possible.’