Colonel Richard Kemp CBE

Kemp commanded troops in active combat in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Iraq. He has experience planning operations in environments where civilian populations are present, where enemies embed in civilian infrastructure, and where proportionality decisions must be made in real time under fire. His judgments are grounded in operational experience, not academic theory.

He has been briefed by senior military commanders in multiple conflicts, including Israel and Hamas. His assessments of IDF conduct are based on direct briefings and his own knowledge of comparable operations, not secondary media accounts.

He is British. Dismissing his testimony as Israeli propaganda requires dismissing a decorated British military officer who has no national, religious, or ethnic stake in the outcome. This is why his UN testimony was so significant — the UN Human Rights Council's criticism of Israel carried less weight once a credentialed Western commander testified to the opposite conclusion using operational evidence.

He has been willing to criticize specific IDF actions where warranted. He is not an unconditional defender of every Israeli decision — he assesses operations against the legal and military standards he has applied throughout his career.

His testimony addressed Hamas's deliberate use of civilian areas — mosques, schools, hospitals, residential buildings — as military infrastructure, and explained that under international humanitarian law, this use shifts legal responsibility for civilian casualties to Hamas, not Israel.

He described the specific precautions the IDF took that exceed the legal minimum: advance warnings via leaflets and telephone calls, roof-knocking (a warning strike before a full strike), tactical restraint that accepted increased risk to Israeli soldiers in order to reduce civilian casualties.

His testimony did not exonerate every IDF action. It provided a calibrated military-legal assessment that the overall conduct of the campaign, judged against the standard applied to all modern militaries, was not genocidal and not in violation of the laws of war.

Kemp has specifically addressed the genocide accusation leveled at Israel in the context of Gaza operations, including October 7's aftermath. His position — grounded in the Genocide Convention's legal definition — is that genocide requires the specific intent to destroy a group as such. No military operation that includes advance warnings, evacuation corridors, and restraint orders can simultaneously carry genocidal intent.

He distinguishes between high civilian casualties (which occur in any urban warfare where combatants embed in civilian areas) and deliberate targeting of civilians as a matter of policy. The former can occur even in a lawful military operation; the latter is what the law prohibits and what genocide requires.

His comparative point: British and American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan operated under similar conditions — urban warfare, enemy combatants in civilian infrastructure — and produced civilian casualty ratios comparable to Israel's in Gaza. No serious commentator called those operations genocidal.