UK spy planes have carried out 600 sorties over Gaza
British spy planes circled regularly over Gaza to gather data for Israel’s military campaign. Flights from the RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus were tracked by the website Declassified UK more than 600 times since December 2023. On occasions they landed in southern Israel.
Since the RAF sorties by Raytheon Shadow R1 reconnaissance aircraft were exposed in May 2024, many have been outsourced to an American aviation contractor. The UK Ministry of Defence said “the unarmed UK reconnaissance aircraft were employed solely for the purpose of locating the remaining hostages”.
But Declassified UK said: “the extraordinary number of flights raises suspicions that the UK is not collecting intelligence solely for this purpose. Flights have often coincided with major offensives in Gaza.”
In December 2024 Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, on a Christmas visit to the Akrotiri base, made a bizarre speech to crews in which he said “thank you” 13 times, adding strangely that “we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here”. This is just part of Britain’s continuing support for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which includes training troops.
But Britain’s is a small part of the The UK American-led military campaign for Israel, and that is only part of western support that includes economic, technological and political backing. Palestinians face the combined might of almost the entire western world.
‘The extraordinary number of flights raises suspicions. Flights have often coincided with major offensives in Gaza’
Israel is a rich country yet it is the biggest recipient of US foreign aid. Before this war it was given £2.83 billion a year. In 2024 as the war got going Congress granted an extra £17.5 billion and this June added another £2.2 billion.
The US arms industry supplies 70% of Israel’s weapons, while big tech corporations are deeply involved in Israel’s security and surveillance programmes.
In effect Israel uses Palestine – the West Bank as well as Gaza – as a research laboratory. Palestinians are the most spied on people on the planet; this is one of the reasons why Israel’s claims that it had no foreknowledge of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 were unconvincing.
The Israelis use CCTV networks with facial recognition capability to monitor public spaces. They have a mobile phone surveillance operation throughout the West Bank and Gaza that is claimed to be able to record a million calls an hour.
Israel promotes the Pegasus phone-hacking system developed by the NSO Group that is marketed worldwide and used by more than 40 governments to spy on their people.
Social media are constantly monitored. Israel sees everything that moves in Palestine. To store all that data it buys space on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. A leak of Microsoft files revealed the enhanced security that has been developed on the instructions of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence operation.
Microsoft staff protested and some took strike action at the news. Under pressure by the boycott movement and its own staff, the company withdrew its service to the unit.
Britain is a smaller donor and supplier than the US, but it hosts Israeli firms with arms factories, some – which were the focus of protests by the now-proscribed activist group Palestine Action – now closed down.
The UK suspended a small proportion of export licences to Israel in 2024 but allows work to continue on components for the F-35A Lightning US warplanes that terrorised Gaza.
Israel has not signed the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, nor opened its nuclear site to inspection
The European Union is sticking with Israel as well. The European Union has an extensive preferential trading agreement with Israel, although the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, did call for its partial suspension.
And there is an even more powerful benefit of western cooperation: Israel has nuclear weapons. Though built with French rather than American expertise in the 1960s, it has hundreds of nuclear warheads.
Israel has never been required to sign the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, nor to open its nuclear site at Dimona in the Naqab desert to inspection – or even to admit its existence.
