On Monday, 9 November, a counter on a parliamentary website went past six digits. A petition calling for a public inquiry into Britain’s “complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza” had gathered more than 100,000 signatures, Al Jazeera reported. At that number, Parliament has to consider the subject for debate.

Consider is the operative word. The British petitions system works like a ladder. At 10,000 signatures the government owes the petitioners a written reply. At 100,000 the petition goes to the House of Commons Petitions Committee, which decides whether MPs will discuss it. Neither step guarantees a debate, and neither comes anywhere near guaranteeing an inquiry. Still, a hundred thousand people have now put their names to one demand, and in a parliamentary state that is a figure that has to be entered in the record.

Four questions

The petition’s official title is more cautious than the language of its supporters: “Launch a public inquiry into the UK’s role in Israeli operations in Gaza.” Jennifer Forbes, chair of Your Party, published it on 23 October 2026. Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s parliamentary leader, is backing it. It took seventeen days to cross the threshold.

The petition asks for a “fully independent inquiry” into British involvement since October 2023, with the power to question the ministers and officials who made the decisions. It sets out four questions. Which arms were supplied to Israel? Which Royal Air Force bases were used, and why? What intelligence did RAF flights gather? And what legal advice did the government seek on whether a genocide has taken place in Gaza?

They read like an auditor’s questions. But each one points at a document a state would rather keep in its own drawers: an export licence, a flight log, a legal memorandum. Petitions of this kind seldom ask a government what it believed. They ask what it signed.

The flights

The surveillance flights are on the record. First under the Conservatives and then under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, Britain flew hundreds of surveillance missions over Gaza and shared intelligence with Israel, Middle East Eye reported. Both governments said the purpose was “hostage rescue”. What the aircraft recorded, and where those recordings went, is the third of the petition’s questions.

Corbyn has spent a long time on this. In late 2025 he co-chaired a tribunal which concluded that Britain had “failed in its fundamental obligation to prevent genocide” and had at times taken an active part in Israeli war crimes. That tribunal had no legal standing. It produced a verdict, but nobody had to answer to it. A statutory public inquiry is a different instrument: it can compel ministers and officials to give evidence.

Speaking for the people who signed, Corbyn said: “They deserve answers, and the Palestinian people deserve justice.” He then turned to the government:

One day, there will be an inquiry. Does this government want to be remembered for getting in the way?

“Delaying scrutiny will not make questions of complicity disappear,” he said, according to Middle East Eye. On X he went further: “We are not going away until we get this inquiry.”

Andy Burnham’s government

The government he is addressing is now led by Andy Burnham. It has not stood entirely still. In September it announced sanctions on Israeli settlements, and Israel answered by forcing Britain to downgrade its consulate in East Jerusalem to a mission. The government also confirmed it had paused cooperation under the 2030 bilateral roadmap, an agreement signed with Israel in 2023.

Corbyn accuses the government of obstructing scrutiny all the same. “If the government had nothing to hide,” he said, “then it would not block our efforts to expose the truth.”

There is an old pattern here, offered as reflection rather than reporting. Governments find it easier to judge what another state does on its land than to let anyone judge what they themselves did from their own airfields. Sanctions point outward. An inquiry points back at the ministry that holds the files.

What happens next

The petition passed 10,000 signatures on 26 October, so a written government response is owed. None appeared on the petition page by Monday. Later that day the parliamentary site showed 105,916 signatures. When Yahoo News UK reported the milestone, the count was 100,009, so the number was still rising.

The Petitions Committee will now decide whether MPs debate the demand. The petition stays open for signatures until 23 April 2027.