Foreign Office Closes Its Own Unit Tracking Israeli War Crimes

The Foreign Office has quietly shut down its in-house unit logging Israeli war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon.

The Guardian revealed last week that the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) cell, which helped government staff assess the scope of Israel’s breaches of international law, has closed amid budget cuts. 

The cuts will also mean the shuttering of the open-source monitoring project at the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent non-profit. As a result, the Foreign Office will lose access to a database of 26,000 verified incidents, thought to be the largest database of its kind. 

John Purcell, head of public affairs at the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, said: “How can the general public have any faith that our government is avoiding complicity in war crimes when it is scrapping the unit that monitors them?” 

Jeremy Corbyn added on X: “The government has spent the past two years turning a blind eye to war crimes in Gaza. Now, the Foreign Office unit that tracks Israeli breaches of international law has closed altogether.

“This is the last stage of British complicity: pretend it never happened at all.”

The decision to cut funding was the result of a restructuring spearheaded by Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office chief sacked last week for his decision not to tell Downing Street that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting for the UN ambassador role.

The Guardian reported that the head of the war crimes team in the government’s counter-terrorism unit urged the government to protect funding for the CIR, whose work is instrumental in helping the Met weigh up Israeli war crimes. 

The Guardian contacted the Foreign Office for comment. 

Sophia Sheera is a journalist in Novara Media’s social media team.