UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has warned leading members and staff of Enfield Council that a petition promoted by Enfield Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Enfield PSC) contains false information and illegal demands. UKLFI has also reported Enfield PSC’s advert in the Enfield Dispatch to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

The advert claims that 70% of Palestinians killed in Gaza are women and children, while the “reasons for calling for action” accompanying the petition claim that 59.5% are women and children.

Both of these are wrong. Even the Hamas-run agencies in Gaza have long since abandoned their false claim, which they had maintained for months from the start of the war, that the proportion of Palestinians killed that are women and children was constantly 70%. There is substantial evidence that Hamas manipulated the figures in order to suggest that Israeli fire was indiscriminate or even targeted women and children.

According to the most recent list of alleged identified fatalities produced by the Hamas agencies as at 7 October 2024 as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the proportion of women and children was between 53% and 55%. By contrast, women and children constitute more than 73% of the Gaza population.

According to this list, 41.1% of fatalities were non-elderly men compared with 22.7% in the Gaza population as a whole.

These figures are significant because they support Israel’s claim that it targets terrorists (mostly non-elderly men), even though (as is unfortunately usual in armed conflict in urban areas) there are also many civilian casualties.

Enfield PSC’s advert is also misleading in claiming “46,000 killed in Gaza equivalent to one in seven Enfield lives”. In the first place, the population of Gaza is nearly 7 times that of Enfield, so the figures are not equivalent. Secondly, the advert contravenes the CAP Code by not including material qualifications, such as the source and unreliability of the figure, and the fact that it includes combatants, those killed by Palestinian fire, and deaths from natural causes, as discussed in UKLFI Charitable Trust’s Briefing Note.

The advert refers to “companies that profit from Israel’s genocide, apartheid & illegal occupation”. UKLFI has submitted that these allegations are also false or misleading.

UKLFI’s letter to Enfield councillors and staff goes on explain that accepting demands in Enfield PSC’s petition for divestment and a procurement boycott would breach fiduciary duties, the Equality Act 2010, the Local Government Act 1988 and the Procurement Act 2023.