UK Middle East minister dismissed Gaza genocide concerns as ‘obnoxious’
Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a British-Egyptian doctor who has worked in Gaza, speaks in front of the High Court in London on 16 May 2025
Dania Akkad reports in Middle East Eye on 16 May 2025:
The UK’s Middle East minister dismissed concerns that a genocide was unfolding in Gaza as “obnoxious and hideous” during a fraught meeting with humanitarian organisations last year, it has been revealed.
The minister, Andrew Mitchell, is said to have been on his phone for most of the session, which was also attended by then-foreign secretary David Cameron, and left a prominent British surgeon who had just returned from working in Gaza feeling he had been part of “tick-box exercise”.
Professor Nick Maynard, who relayed his experiences in evidence to the High Court as part of the legal challenge brought over UK arms exports to Israel, said he had brought laminated photos of injured children to try to get his point across, but to no avail.
“I had a very limited time to speak, but there was no question that the foreign secretary was given the information detailing the indiscriminate mutilation and killing of children in Gaza,” he wrote in a witness statement of the February 2024 meeting. “I left the meeting with no confidence that the information would be acted upon, and in my view the information we gave them was ignored.”
Mitchell has declined to comment on Maynard’s account. A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We do not comment on live litigation.”
First-hand accounts
Fifteen months later, Maynard’s testimony and those of other British healthcare workers who have worked in Gaza were read aloud in front of the High Court on Friday morning.
It was the fourth and final day of the judicial review to decide whether British ministers have acted lawfully by continuing to supply UK-made F-35 parts that could end up in Israeli fighter jets.
Mitchell and Cameron were foreign office ministers in the previous Conservative government, which was in office before the current Labour government’s general election victory last July.
The Labour government in September suspended about 30 arms export licences over concerns that weapons supplied by the UK could be used in violation of international humanitarian law. But F-35 fighter jet components, which British companies supply to a global spare parts pool, were partially exempted, with the government citing national security concerns.
Campaigners argue the exemption means that British-made components could still end up in Israeli jets indirectly through the global pool, and has left the government in breach of its domestic and international obligations.