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At a parliamentary committee hearing this week, ministers were probed on how it was possible to “see the day-by-day destruction” of Gaza with “more than 50,000 buildings destroyed”, as seen by the RAF spy planes, and not conclude that Israel’s conduct is disproportionate.
Lord Coaker claimed that surveillance footage “is purely and simply used in terms of hostage [rescue] and seeing whether we can locate the hostages”.
None of the RAF sorties have resulted in the successful release of any British hostages in Gaza. There is only one surviving UK hostage in the strip, Emily Damari, who is a 28-year-old dual national and the cousin of Lord Levy.
The Foreign Office further admitted that it has not requested surveillance footage from the Ministry of Defence in order to inform its assessment of Israel’s compliance with IHL.
Stephen Lillie, the Foreign Office’s director for defence and international security, told the committee: “To the best of my knowledge we have not asked for that information from RAF flights”.
Spying for Israel: Starmer's secret surveillance of Gaza caught on camera
‘Intriguing mystery’
Another key issue was the “carve-out” in Britain’s arms export licensing which allows F-35 fighter jet components to continue to be sent to Israel via third countries. Byrne described this exemption as an “intriguing mystery”.
Over 15% of every F-35 – Israel’s most advanced fighter jet – is made in the UK as part of a consortium led by US arms giant Lockheed Martin.
Declassified and The Ditch revealed last week that over 500 shipments of F-35 parts have been sent from Britain to the US since October 2023. Those components could then be onward exported to Israel and used to commit war crimes in Gaza.
The decision to keep sending F-35 components to global pools of spare parts has been the subject of a court challenge by Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.
On 25 November, those organisations wrote to the UK government to confirm their intention to file an emergency injunction over the decision to exempt F-35 parts from arms suspensions.
In spite of this, Coaker informed the committee that there was “no particular appetite” for suspending the export of F-35 components to countries which supply the Israeli air force. He also said that the UK government was not conducting a review into this specific issue.
To this end, Coaker was asked whether the UK government’s obligations to US arms giant Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor in the F-35 programme, superseded its own obligations to IHL.
“Nobody can fail to be moved by the horrific pictures we see on our televisions screens”, Coaker said.
“What we’re saying as the Ministry of Defence is…, alongside that horror, we also have to consider… the programme that the F-35 is part of… delivers peace and security in many parts of the world and defends our freedom”, he added.
Coaker did concede that the US government is able to track whether F-35 parts made in Britain end up in Israel. However, the UK government “has no ability to influence where they go”, one official noted.
“The only place where you can stop parts from entering the [F-35] programme is at the UK border”, Coaker added. “Once they go out they’re not our property”, but that of the US Department of Defense.
Ministers struggled to clarify how this is consistent with the UK government’s obligations under the UN Arms Trade Treaty, which states that arms must not be exported to a country when they could be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of IHL”.
