A grassroots campaign led by the UK’s Your Party has crossed a major civic milestone, as a petition calling for a formal independent public inquiry into alleged British complicity in Israel’s acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip has amassed more than 100,000 verified signatures, automatically meeting the official threshold that requires UK parliamentary authorities to consider scheduling a dedicated debate on the matter. The initiative was first launched by Jenn Forbes, national chair of Your Party, on October 23, with a core mandate to establish a fully independent public investigation granted full statutory powers to summon and question current and former British cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, and intelligence officials over their actions related to UK engagement with Israeli operations in Gaza. Speaking to supporters shortly after the signature milestone was confirmed, Jeremy Corbyn, parliamentary leader of Your Party, emphasized that the overwhelming public backing for the petition reflects widespread public demand for transparency, accountability, and justice for Palestinian communities affected by the ongoing conflict. Corbyn laid out a series of specific, unaddressed questions that the proposed inquiry would be tasked with resolving: the full scope and category of military hardware supplied by the UK to Israeli forces, the nature of intelligence data collected via British surveillance operations over Gaza and how that data was utilized by Israeli authorities, the full text of legal advice provided to sitting ministers regarding UK obligations under international genocide conventions, and the formal decision-making trails that led to those policy choices. He stressed that while securing a parliamentary debate is a critical first step, the movement’s ultimate non-negotiable demand remains a statutory independent public inquiry with full coercive powers to compel testimony from all relevant parties and disclose the complete scale of UK involvement in Gaza-related operations. The push for the inquiry builds on findings from a people’s tribunal co-chaired by Corbyn in late 2025, which collected sworn testimony from dozens of witnesses including United Nations special rapporteurs, frontline conflict journalists, Gaza-based medical workers, and leading international law academics. The tribunal’s final published report concluded that the UK had failed to uphold its binding international legal obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, had been complicit in documented atrocity crimes, and in specific documented cases had acted as an active participant in Israeli war crimes. Corbyn noted during a public address on Monday that the demand for accountability will not fade over time, and that future historical records will judge the current government harshly if it chooses to obstruct rather than support full public scrutiny. He added that any administration with no evidence of improper conduct to hide would have no reason to block a formal inquiry, and that delaying public oversight will not erase the outstanding public questions over UK policy. The petition’s breakthrough comes against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relations between the UK and Israel over the past two months. Tensions escalated sharply after the UK government led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced formal sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank in September, a move that prompted Israeli authorities to retaliate by forcing the UK to downgrade its longstanding consulate in occupied East Jerusalem to a lower-status diplomatic mission. Late last month, the UK government also formally confirmed that it had suspended all bilateral cooperation activities under the 2030 UK-Israel strategic roadmap, a wide-ranging bilateral agreement originally signed in 2023 under the previous Conservative administration, shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu’s current far-right Israeli government took office. Declassified and leaked documents referenced in the tribunal’s findings show that successive UK governments, first under the Conservatives and then under Keir Starmer’s prior Labour administration, authorized hundreds of surveillance flights operating over Gaza throughout the course of Israeli military operations, with all successive administrations previously claiming that the shared intelligence from those flights was exclusively used to support hostage rescue efforts. The 2025 Gaza Tribunal’s full set of recommendations also includes calls for the UK government to impose comprehensive targeted economic sanctions on Israel, terminate all existing military cooperation with Israeli security forces, launch a separate investigation into any British citizens alleged to have participated in documented Israeli war crimes in Gaza, and fully cooperate with any eventual official independent public inquiry examining all forms of UK-Israel security and political cooperation dating back to October 2023.
Petition for inquiry into UK ‘complicity’ in Gaza genocide passes 100,000 threshold
