What are the ramifications? If breaching international law has no effects, what good is it? Doesn’t the US repeatedly ignore it? The Middle East is a portfolio of misdeeds by the USA…

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The British government has received advice from its own lawyers stating that Israel has breached international humanitarian law in Gaza but has failed to make it public, according to a leaked recording obtained by the Observer.

The comments, made by the Conservative chair of the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs, Alicia Kearns, at a Tory fundraising event on 13 March are at odds with repeated ministerial denials and evasion on the issue.

Answering questions at an “evening drinks reception” hosted by the West Hampstead and Fortune Green Conservatives in London, Kearns said: “The Foreign Office has received official legal advice that Israel has broken international humanitarian law but the government has not announced it.

The British barrister and judge Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was the lead prosecutor at former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s trial from 2002 to 2006, said he would not be at all surprised if such advice had been given by government lawyers and called for it to be made public.

On 22 March, David Lammy MP, the shadow foreign secretary, wrote to Cameron, calling on him to publish the legal advice on Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law.

On 26 March in the House of Commons, Lammy asked the minister for development and Africa, Andrew Mitchell MP, if the foreign secretary had received legal advice saying there was a clear risk that items licensed by the UK might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

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