Empty Words: Dollimore’s Record on Gaza
GABRIEL CARLYLE asks how Helena Dollimore responded to the horrors unfolding in Gaza since becoming our MP in 2024
Helena Dollimore’s record as MP for Hastings & Rye tells a consistent, if disturbing, story in Parliament, on social media and in rare written responses to constituents.
But before laying this out, it is necessary to recall some key facts.
MORE THAN 20,000 CHILDREN
In January 2024, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), found that there was a case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. It ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to stop acts of genocide and take “immediate and effective measures” to allow aid into Gaza.
In July 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel was guilty of both unlawful occupation and the crime of apartheid. It found that Israeli policy imposed and “serve[d] to maintain a near-complete separation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between the settler and Palestinian communities”, including separate roads and legal systems.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts” in Gaza.
Since then, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, two of Israel’s leading human rights organisations (B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel), and the world’s leading association of genocide scholars, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have all declared that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza.
In September 2025, Ms Dollimore’s former employer, Save the Children, reported that “At least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour on average by Israeli forces in Gaza over nearly 23 months of war, with the number of children killed now surpassing 20,000.”
Moreover, notwithstanding the so-called “ceasefire”, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is still ongoing.
Indeed, according to Amnesty International, Israel is “still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in their intent”.
LEGAL OBLIGATIONS ON GENOCIDE
These facts carry clear legal obligations for the UK government. So what is Helena Dollimore doing? Since her election to Parliament in July 2024, Ms Dollimore has consistently refused to acknowledge that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza – or that her government is obliged to take all necessary steps to prevent it, choosing instead to follow the ‘party line’ blindly.
In May 2025, she effectively counselled delay, claiming that while the UK was “fully committed to upholding international law” it was “important that the international courts are left to rule [on] where international humanitarian law is breached”.
Yet as Tufts University’s Alex de Waal – who has 40 years of experience as a humanitarian worker and expert on famine – noted in July 2025: “The Genocide Convention is, first and foremost, a convention to prevent genocide. The question of whether there is or is not genocide is secondary to the question of whether Israel and other states that are party to the Genocide Convention are fulfilling their obligations to prevent genocide. They are not doing so.”
UK ARMS SALES
In a June 2025 poll, 57% of the British public supported a full arms embargo on Israel, with only 13% opposed. In stark contrast, Ms Dollimore has consistently refused to back an end to UK arms sales to Israel or to do anything to hold her government accountable for these ongoing transfers, notwithstanding the UK’s legal obligations to stop these exports and the clear evidence that these arms have been used to carry out war crimes against Gaza’s population.
In July 2025, she even claimed (on Facebook) that “Our Government has suspended arm sales” – failing to mention that only a small minority (less than 10%) of export licences had actually been suspended.
Unlike other Labour MPs, she also failed to object to the supply of crucial components for the F35 fighter aircraft – which continued despite the ‘suspension’ – formed the single largest and most important part of the UK’s arms trade with Israel. Indeed, without the continuous supply of spare parts from the UK, as well as other producer countries, it would have been impossible for Israel to have kept using the F-35s to bomb Gaza. In July 2024, an F-35 was used to drop three 2,000lb bombs in an attack on a so-called ‘safe zone’ in Al-Mawasi – an area of Gaza that has Council-backed friendship links with Hastings – killing 90 people.
SANCTIONS
Given the above, it is perhaps unsurprising that Helena Dollimore has also failed to acknowledge that Israel is guilty of apartheid or to call for any meaningful sanctions on Israel.
For example, she was not one of the 84 parliamentarians – including some Labour MPs – who wrote to the Foreign Secretary David Lammy in July 2025, calling for an arms embargo, a ban on all trade with illegal Israeli settlements, targeted sanctions on on all individuals and entities complicit in Israel’s occupation, and a full review of UK-Israel relations to ensure that no support is being given to violations of international law.
REPRESSION
It’s not true, however, that our MP has been completely inactive on all Gaza-related matters. Indeed, Ms Dollimore has dutifully backed her government’s repression of campaigners who’ve been opposing Israel’s genocide, most notably by voting in July to ban the nonviolent protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.
The resulting restrictions on free speech – there is now only one legally-permissible answer to the question “Do you support Palestine Action?” – have already led to 2,700 arrests of entirely peaceful protestors and led to Amnesty International launching its first-ever Urgent Action (UA) regarding the right to protest in the UK.
More recently, Ms Dollimore has refused to join fellow Labour MPs in signing any of the Early Day Motions calling on the Justice Secretary to “to engage urgently with the legal representatives of the pro-Palestinian activists who are on hunger strike in UK prisons” (the final four hunger strikers only concluding their strike on 15 January (three) and 26 January (one) after gaining concessions.
She now looks set to vote in favour of the government’s planned restrictions on ‘repeat protests’. This measure is being brought in because of the embarrassment that the peaceful mass protests against Israel’s genocide – protests which have included mass Jewish participation – have caused to this government.
EMPTY WORDS
Helena Dollimore and her supporters will doubtless point to public statements in which she has highlighted “the desperate need to get more aid into Gaza”, condemned the “awful” suffering of civilians in Gaza and the targeting of aid workers, and stated her support for a two-state solution as evidence of her good intentions.
However, these and similar words ring very hollow given her government’s failure to impose any meaningful form of sanctions on Israel and her ongoing refusal to challenge this failure. As her fellow Labour MP Richard Burgon has noted: “Israel is committing war crime after war crime. We don’t need more empty words from the Government calling on Israel to do the right thing. We need tough action to force Israel to end its atrocities against the Palestinian people. That means ending all arms sales and imposing widespread sanctions on Israel – just as were rightly imposed on Russia over Ukraine.”
Further information here: hastingspalestinecampaign.org
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Greatand well researched piece. While fighting passionately on water but not calling for renationlisation (preferably without compensation) and ‘local’ safe ssues, on the genocide in Gaza in all aspects, Helena Dollimore has lackedd all inegrity honesty or any courage. Undercut at every point by her own ambition all her commentsdo ring hollow and I hope she will be reminded for the rest of her political life what her silencee and vacuity has cost in terms of the lives of innocents, including an estimated 20,000 children.