Baroness Helena Kennedy labels Israel’s Gaza campaign a genocide

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. 

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