The Guardian reports:

Israel is “flagrantly and regularly” committing war crimes in Gaza, according to a former British diplomat who recently resigned over ministers’ failure to ban arms sales to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Mark Smith, who resigned as a counter-terrorism official at the British embassy in Dublin after raising complaints about the sale of British weapons to Israel, told the BBC on Monday that he believed Israel to be in breach of international law.

Smith told Radio 4’s Today programme: “When you look at what constitutes a war crime, it’s actually quite clear, even from what you see in open source on the TV, that the state of Israel is perpetrating war crimes in plain sight.

“Anybody who has a kind of basic understanding of these things can see that there are war crimes being committed, not once, not twice, not a few times, but quite flagrantly and openly and regularly.” [Continue reading…]

Since the Hamas-led massacre on October 7th and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians in the strip.

Current figures show over 2,300 are still being held, while more than 1,900 have been released back into Gaza without any charge or explanation for why they were imprisoned in the first place.

Those released show clear signs of mistreatment but in testimony collected for this programme we can reveal shocking allegations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse inflicted on Palestinian detainees.

A warning there are distressing images and graphic descriptions of sexual abuse and offensive language in this report which contains material filmed for us by local journalists in Gaza.