On 18 March, I secured a Westminster Hall debate on the UK’s secretive military cooperation with Israel’s war in Gaza and a chance to hear a government minister respond. Given Labour’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza (with minor concessions compared to their predecessors) it was more in hope than expectation that I would get answers on the UK’s possible complicity in crimes against humanity.
The British people are reasonable – they do not expect the conflict in the Middle East to be resolved single-handedly overnight. But they do demand – rightfully and unequivocally – moral clarity, a commitment by the UK government to work to end hostilities and assurance our nation is not facilitating war crimes.
The International Court of Justice ruled the occupation illegal. It warned Israel’s actions in Gaza may constitute genocide. Under international law, the UK is not only obliged not to facilitate these crimes but also to actively prevent them. Yet, despite this duty, our country continues military cooperation with Israel.
Too often, we speak in numbers. Tens of thousands dead or millions displaced. But as the saying goes, ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths, a statistic.’ Those killed, at least, deserve recognition. Their lights extinguished, I recount the last moments of two young souls. We cannot allow them to be statistics.
Shaban al-Dalou, was a bright software engineering student, just days away from his 20th birthday and the apple of his mother’s eye when an Israeli airstrike hit the Al-Aqsa Hospital. The world witnessed the horrific image of Sha’ban—attached to an IV bag, burning alive. His mother, the woman who had nurtured his every dream, died alongside him. They were buried in an embrace.
The second, six-year-old Hind Rajab, whose last seconds on Earth were captured by her pleading calls to the emergency services as she sat in a car surrounded by five dead relatives, bodies riddled with bullets. Despite the best efforts of the Palestinian Red Crescent, who met the same fate as her relatives, death visited young Hind. She too was found riddled with bullets.
These young faces are not statistics. These are human lives. Lives the UK government may have been complicit in taking.
The facts of the UK’s cooperation with Israel
The UK’s cooperation with Israel extends beyond moral and political. We have provided arms, intelligence, air bases and potentially sovereign land space in Gibraltar.
In September 2024, the government acknowledged Israel was not complying with international humanitarian law and admitted UK arms exports were at risk of being used in serious violation. Since then, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade has identified £100 million of military equipment potentially approved for export to Israel, including spare parts for F-35 jets. These parts are covered under a general licence, allowing unlimited exports to approved partners worldwide. Furthermore, given more than 15% of every F-35 is made in the UK, Israeli airstrikes would not be possible without British components. It is also possible our military has been providing parts directly to Israel, with RAF Marham in Norfolk allegedly being used more than seven times. Since withdrawing some export licenses last year, the UK has issued 34 new licences, including for aircraft components. There are now more active UK arms licences to Israel than before the conflict started.
The use of our air base in Akrotiri, Cyprus has been contentious despite our government’s claims that it has only been used by Shadow R1aircraft for intelligence gathering, to find the hostages. There have been over 645 of these flights in a year – what have they seen and what have we shared? Why were the families of the three British World Central Kitchen aid workers who were killed by the IDF in April 2024 not allowed to view images recorded by our surveillance planes? What are we hiding?
If British families are being denied information, I fear we will never know what happened on May 27th 2024, when at least 45 Palestinians were killed in Rafah, when another UK surveillance aircraft was in operation. Again, the footage has not been released.
The RAF also used Atlas C1 aircraft – large enough to carry military cargo – while the US was simultaneously transporting military equipment onto RAF Akrotiri.
Finally, there is mounting evidence of UK harbour and fuel facilities in Gibraltar being used for vessels transporting weapons from the US to Israel.
The fundamental reason I secured the debate was to find the truth, not to catch out our government. We stand on the precipice of the global legal-based order collapsing. We – the nation that helped built that order – today risk its dismantling. International law is not a game of pick-and-mix, where we enforce it in one case and ignore it in another. By allowing Israeli exceptionalism, we threaten to undermine its very concept.
History will judge us not by our words, but by our actions. The UK government continues to talk peace and ceasefires while saying nothing about actions that appear to support the Israeli war machine. They need to come clean and start telling the truth. Only truth serves justice and only justice can bring peace.
It is their moral duty. When history looks back on this moment, we must be able to say – with absolute certainty – we stood on the right side.
Images of Shaban al-Dalou can be found here: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/10/15/shaban-al-dalou-the-palestinian-teen-burned-to-death-in-israeli-bombing
An image of Hind Rajab can be found here:
