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Baroness Helena Kennedy labels Israel’s Gaza campaign a genocide
- Sondos Asem, Middle East Eye
- Jul 9
- 5 min read
‘We're now witnessing a genocide taking place before our eyes,’ says top British barrister as she denounces Israeli defence minister’s plans for ‘concentration camp’
Baroness Helena Kennedy KC on Tuesday labelled Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as a genocide, in the first such public statement by one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers.
Speaking to BBC’s World at One, Kennedy also called the plan by Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz to confine the Palestinian population of Gaza into an area of the south as a “concentration camp”.
“What is being contemplated is the creation of a mass concentration camp and using the persecution of these people to have them make the false choice, the coerced choice,” Kennedy, who is a Labour member of the House of Lords, said.
“We now know about how coercion can operate on the psyche of people, that they end up feeling so hopeless and so in despair, that there is nothing for them, that their life is over unless they leave.”
The plan would initially involve ejecting 600,000 displaced Palestinians from the al-Mawasi area to an area on the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
Once forced into this new zone, a security screening would take place. Palestinians who enter the area would not be allowed to leave, Katz said.
Katz envisaged that the entire civilian population of Gaza, over two million people, would eventually all be confined into this new “city”.
"This plan is not legal,” said Kennedy, citing the prohibition of forced transfers of a civilian population stipulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
Kennedy was a member of the expert panel that supported the arrest warrant application by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, last year, in which he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza war.
The charges are mainly associated with the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.
On Monday, Katz said that the new city would be built, if conditions permit, during a proposed 60-day pause in the war currently being negotiated by Israel and Hamas. It will include the establishment of four aid distribution centres within the area.
The minister added that the Israeli military would secure the perimeter of the site, but would not run it. He further said Israel was seeking international partners to manage the site, but did not elaborate on who they were.
His ambition, he told reporters, was to encourage Palestinians to “voluntarily” leave the Gaza Strip to other countries - echoing US President Donald Trump’s plan for the enclave, which has been denounced as a prelude to ethnic cleansing and a crime against humanity.
'We become complicit'
Commenting on the plan, Kennedy said Israel’s war started off based on self-defence arguments but has now degenerated to a situation akin to a concentration camp.
“To take it to a level where you force people out of the places that they live in and force them into camps, a concentration camp, is absolutely not in accordance with law, but it seems that law doesn't matter anymore,” she told the BBC.
“We're seeing the unravelling of the international consensus around that rules-based order that was created after the Second World War.”
When challenged by BBC host Sarah Montague on the use of the term “concentration camps”, Kennedy stood by her statement.
“Our understanding of concentration camps is surely very different from this. Because concentration camp people were put in, were starved to death within a concentration camp,” commented Montague.
In response, Kennedy replied: “Well, we're witnessing starvation at the moment … We're hearing from medical professionals and experts in the issue of malnutrition about the impact on the wellbeing of infants and children.”
Asked whether she considers the situation as a genocide, Kennedy said she was initially hesitant to use the term but has now changed her view.
“I have now moved to a position where I believe that we're now witnessing a genocide taking place before our eyes,” she said.
“I was very reluctant to go there because the threshold has to be very high. There has to be specific intent for genocide. But what we're now seeing is genocidal behaviour.”
Proving a special intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group is what distinguishes genocide from other international crimes, like war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Kennedy joins a growing group of legal experts and public figures who, in recent months, have declared Israel's war on Gaza to be unequivocally a genocide, despite the hesitancy of western governments to use the term.
Leading human rights organisations have reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide.
In December, Amnesty International became the first major human rights organisation to conclude that Israel had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, while Human Rights Watch concluded that "genocidal acts" had been committed.
But British officials, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, have consistently refused to use the word genocide, saying such a determination should be made by a competent court.
The Irish and Spanish governments have been the only western governments so far to call out Israel's actions as genocidal.
Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has also recently made the argument that Israel is committing genocide, as has the UN's former aid chief Martin Griffiths.
Israel rejects accusations of genocide, and justifies its military operation in Gaza saying it has a right to self-defence. The Israeli army also claims it is abiding by international humanitarian law, or the law governing armed conflicts.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently hearing a case brought by South Africa in December 2023, accusing Israel of genocide.
A ruling by the ICJ, which is the UN's highest court, is expected to take several years.
Scholars and historians of the Holocaust have also labelled the Gaza conflict as a genocide, some as early as October 2023.
In her BBC interview, Kennedy also said the UK may be complicit in Israel’s conduct, and urged British officials to bring up the matter during French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit on Tuesday.
“We become complicit if we do not make it very clear that we oppose what is taking place,” she said.
“I'm speaking here just now, not only as simply somebody who's witnessing something horrible, but I'm also speaking as a lawyer who knows what international law sought to do," she added.
“You have to have the big players in the world commit to it.”
(c) 2025, Middle East Eye.
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