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Paul Heron is the UK lawyer pushing for 10 British-Israeli dual citizens to be investigated for war crimes.
Mr Heron leads the Public Interest Legal Centre (PILC) – a UK legal charity which commissioned a 240-page report accusing the 10 people of committing atrocities in Gaza while serving as soldiers in the Israeli army.
He spoke to The National about why he thinks this work is important, what effect he hopes it will have and how grassroots movements can inspire change.
How did you identify these 10 people, and why is this work important?
Anybody who has a modicum of humanity would be outraged and appalled by what’s going on in Gaza, seeing the destruction and killings and targeting of civilians.
One of the reasons for doing it was to do our little bit against the potential normalisation of what’s going on; normalisation of not just breaching international law and breaching the laws of the global justice framework, but also, that it doesn’t become the normal way of things. I’m not saying our small submission is going to stop that – it's part of a growing movement among lawyers and legal professionals to really hold people to account.
In terms of identifying the individuals we’ve named in our report – when we’ve investigated who potentially had gone from Britain or are British-Israeli dual nationals who potentially served in Gaza, the list was much longer. But through a detailed analysis of who they are, who they served with and potentially what they did in Gaza, we were able to narrow the list down to 10 suspects.
In newspapers in the UK, it’s been reported that over 100 British or British-Israeli dual nationals have served in Gaza and so our work goes on to establish who the other people are and whether they served in Gaza and examining what role they played so far.
What are you accusing them of doing, specifically, or is this just about their participation in the Israeli offensive in Gaza?
The difficulty in answering the question is of course that I can’t name them, and I can’t go into detail as to what we allege they have done specifically, because it could prejudice the case.
However, in a broad brush, the crimes, and crimes against humanity we allege they have been involved in include murder, causing great suffering and cruel treatment, attacking civilians wilfully, forcible transfer and deportation, and attacks on humanitarian personnel. We’ve seen it with the outrageous killing of medical workers and extermination as it relates to cultural sites and things like hospitals and other necessary infrastructure, which is all related to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
So in that broad brush we’ve been able to pull together a report which is able to identify who these people are, and in specific cases what they’ve done.
Is it even legal for dual nationals in the UK to serve in armies abroad?
There are laws that prevent it and they’ve been used in UK courts against British nationals who served for Kurdish forces in northern Iraq against ISIS – and British nationals who served in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Strangely, it hasn’t been used against British nationals who have served in Gaza.
Our report, which we served to the War Crimes team at the Metropolitan Police, is trying to prompt some action – action further to the report we’ve given, or [to prompt] the British authorities and state to take action on its own behalf to potentially arrest individuals who have served in Gaza and prosecute them as well.
There’s a kind of hypocrisy going on and the clear reason is of course that the British state and government has provided regular shipments of armaments to the Israeli military and crucially logistical support to the Israeli military in Gaza.
Where is the case at right now – and do you think it’s going to materialise into something substantial? Additionally, what is your response to people who brush aside your accusations as an unfortunate byproduct of war?
First of all, sadly the wheels of justice turn very slowly. The case or the submission is to the War Crimes team and they’ll be investigating the case and using the resources they have to hopefully develop some of the pointers and arguments we’ve provided to them. This is what we hope and expect. The next stage after they complete the investigation, which could take up to two years, is that the case will be presented to the Crown Prosecution Service to say 'we think there’s a case for prosecution and we think arrests should be made'.
If the Crown Prosecution Service is prepared to pursue the prosecutions, then arrest warrants will be issued by the court. There’s also a facility in the UK that if the Crown Prosecution Service refuses to act, we have the facility as lawyers to bring a private prosecution so we can potentially look at that before or after they refuse to process it.
The second point to your question is the issue of the Israeli military saying it’s all part of war.
There are unfortunately innocent people who die in the course of war. And on one level that’s true. However, the rule of law also states that there must be proportionality. That the actions the Israeli military take must be proportionate, and our argument is that they’re not proportionate.
So for instance: a Hamas member enters a building in Gaza. The Israeli military has followed him to presumably kill him, and they bomb the building he is entering, knowing full well that there are dozens of families, children and innocents there.
That’s disproportionate and is a war crime, and that’s the argument we’re prepared to face because we say the actions of the Israeli military throughout the period of invading Gaza have been completely and utterly and totally disproportionate to what the objective is.
How are you piecing together the evidence? Are you including digital evidence posted on social media by the accused themselves, for example?
Because the UK government is signed up to the Geneva Conventions and Rome Statues, we have the ICC Act and Geneva Conventions Act where international law, crimes of war and crimes against humanity are incorporated domestically. So, we have the benefit, of bringing in a regular criminal case against the individuals involved – those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In terms of the broad evidence, you’re right that in the work we’ve done we’ve been able to bring together all aspects of open-source material. We have collated and we have analysed over the course of eight months a whole series of reports of incidents from the UN and the Red Crescent and Red Cross from incidents reported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli military use of TikTok, Instagram, Twitter etc. We've documented all that material and brought it together and saved it and illustrated that for the War Crimes team.
It's all open-source material, and of course that’s why we’ve given it to the Metropolitan Police. The resources of the Metropolitan Police are far greater than a small not-for-profit law centre and we really hope and are demanding and will be meeting with the War Crimes team to say to them, 'you need to put the resources of the Metropolitan Police – both staffing and financial resources – to deep dive into this information to enable a criminal prosecution to be brought that’s both legally tight and can be tightly legally argued, to bring about prosecutions and convictions'.
What are some of the challenges you are expecting to face?
The first one, we’re hoping there’s no restriction or limit to resources provided to the War Crimes team.
The second one is really to do with access to material. We say that the British government has been involved in assisting the Israeli military. We would hope and expect the War Crimes team to access the material from the British government from their reports and assistance to the Israeli military.
Three, we hope and will be keeping a close eye on potentially political interference. As you know, the British government has been backing the Israeli military throughout this conflict and we hope that the War Crimes team and the police officers team investigating the case will not face the level of political interference over the course of the investigation.
That’s something we’ll be guarding against and will need to raise if necessary in parliament and other committees in the political process to ensure that does not happen.
Why are you going after 10 people, who are part of a bigger army, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still a free man after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest?
We are a small organisation with limited resources. And obviously we’d have liked to have had multiple researchers and people working on it to provide a report that’s more extensive and goes to 20, 30 people.
So on one level it’s making a point and saying there has to be accountability and there has to be justice and if you’re a dual national thinking of going to Gaza, think again because the wheels of justice will turn and come after you. There might be a knock on the door and you might be arrested.
Whether the law in and of itself can bring about the changes that we ultimately need; it can play a role, in my opinion, but ultimately it’s for ordinary people and people campaigning and bringing about revolutionary change that changes the situation in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel itself. There has to be a political and social movement that gets rid of the political leadership that we have that becomes more interested in people and people’s needs as opposed to the profits.
I’m a lawyer and can do my bit but everybody can do their bit as well.
Can grassroots movements like this, where the police carry out a judge’s orders, make a bigger difference than global institutions, or do you think they work in tandem together?
I think they can effectively work side by side and the actions in the ICC and International Court of Justice (ICJ) have inspired lawyers throughout the world to take action locally, and it may be that the local action taken in the UK and other parts of the world may affect change so that the ICC and ICJ can be more effective.
I think the difficulty we have with the international and local courts is the individual states like the US, UK and other countries which seem to be operating against the law and against international law. So we have leaders both globally and locally that seem to be acting against what’s set internationally since the Second World War.
I think they can work in tandem and together very successfully and bring about accountability and prosecutions and some form of justice to the people of Palestine. But unfortunately it’s a slow justice and not guaranteed, and for us to get that guarantee the other thing that needs to work in tandem is lawyers with movements and campaigns and ordinary mass movements to ensure that international law is obeyed and protected, and is not just there for western powers, but holds everybody to account.
