Britain’s Labour government has ordered 100 spy flights over Gaza to aid Israeli intelligence, it can be revealed.
This amounts to an average of more than one a day since Keir Starmer became prime minister on July 5.
Starmer’s administration suspended 30 arms export licences for Israel last month, citing “a clear risk” the weapons might be used in a “serious violation” of international law.
But the spy flights, which began in December under the previous Conservative government, have continued apace.
Although the Ministry of Defence (MoD) refused to give details, Declassified independently found the flights departing from Akrotiri – Britain’s sprawling air base on Cyprus – to fly over Gaza on Starmer’s watch.
During Labour’s first full month in office, in August, the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew 42 flights over the devastated Palestinian territory.
The new information is likely to raise further concerns about British complicity in war crimes in Gaza, with pro-Palestine activists protesting outside Akrotiri on Sunday.
International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan has requested arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant.
The World Court is also investigating Israel for what it has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.
On Monday evening, as Israel invaded Lebanon, Starmer sent a huge A400M military transport plane from Akrotiri to Tel Aviv. The vehicle can carry 116 fully-equipped soldiers and a 81,600lb payload.
Then on Tuesday evening, the UK dispatched Typhoon fighter jets from Cyprus to defend Israel against missiles from Iran.
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Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) refuses to publish a military pact it signed with Israel in December 2020 which could relate to the HEZUK project.
Former British soldier Joe Glenton, who works for campaign group ForcesWatch, told Declassified: “These leaks show once again how deeply entangled the UK is with Israel.
“It has to raise a number of ethical questions given the ongoing genocide in Gaza – and now the assault on Lebanon, itself a UK ally whose army is being trained by British troops”.
He added: “the public urgently need to know if the military and intelligence engagements detailed in these documents, which appear to date back a few years now, are still live programs. Because if they are, British military and intelligence personnel are being put to work supporting a genocidal state”.
The MoD refused to clarify whether HEZUK was ongoing.
A UK government spokesperson said: “We regularly work with partners and allies across the Middle East to contribute to regional security. This includes intelligence sharing, where it benefits our national security, as well as defence industrial collaboration, which supports UK economic growth”.
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Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.
A Palestinian child who was wounded in an Israeli attack on Jabalia, Gaza receives treatment on October 9, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The latest move to forcefully and violently push thousands of people from northern Gaza to the south is turning the north into a lifeless desert,” warned one aid worker.
The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday that at least 400,000 people are trapped in northern Gaza as Israeli forces ramp up their bombardment of the area, killing dozens and intensifying an already nightmarish humanitarian emergency.
“Northern Gaza: no end to hell,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), wrote on social media. “Recent evacuation orders from the Israeli authorities are forcing people to flee again and again, especially from Jabalia Camp. Many are refusing because they know too well that no place anywhere in Gaza is safe.”
Lazzarini said some UNRWA shelters and services in northern Gaza have been forced to shut down amid the Israeli assault “for the first time since the war began” over a year ago.
“With almost no basic supplies available, hunger is spreading and deepening again,” said Lazzarini. “This recent military operation also threatens the implementation of the second phase of the polio vaccination campaign for children. Children are as ever, the first and most to suffer. They deserve so much better, they deserve a cease-fire now, they deserve a future.”
Zero humanitarian aid has entered besieged northern Gaza in over a week, according to aid groups and the U.N., and incessant Israeli attacks have rendered the area’s hospitals largely inaccessible. Israeli forces have ordered the area’s hospitals to evacuate, endangering patients and healthcare workers.
The director of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital told Drop Site on Wednesday that he is refusing to comply with Israel’s evacuation order.
“As long as there are patients, I won’t leave,” said Dr. Hossam Abu Safia. “I’ve been here since the genocide started, and I am determined to continue helping my people.”
At least dozens of people have reportedly been killed in the Israeli military’s latest assault on northern Gaza, but emergency workers on the ground have said it’s impossible to determine the true toll given Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign, which has targeted the Jabalia refugee camp and other areas in the region.
Citing Gaza’s Civil Defense, The Associated Press reported Wednesday that an Israeli airstrike “hit a family home” in the Jabalia camp, “killing at least nine people”—including two women and two children.
“Footage shared by the Civil Defense showed first responders recovering dead bodies and body parts from under the rubble,” the outlet noted.
On Monday—the one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led October 7 attack and the beginning of Israel’s devastating response—Israeli forces ordered swaths of famine-stricken northern Gaza to evacuate, instructing residents to move south to Deir Al-Balah and Al-Mawasi, badly overcrowded so-called “humanitarian zones” that the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, said Tuesday that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is “turning the north of Gaza into an unlivable wasteland, effectively emptying out the whole north of the strip of Palestinian life.”
“The latest move to forcefully and violently push thousands of people from northern Gaza to the south is turning the north into a lifeless desert, while aggravating the situation in the south, where more than one million people have already been squeezed into a small portion of the Gaza Strip and live in deplorable conditions,” said Sarah Vuylsteke, an MSF project coordinator in Gaza.
“Access to water, healthcare, and safety is already almost nonexistent, and the thought of more people fitting into this space is impossible to imagine,” Vuylsteke added. “People have been subjected to endless displacement and relentless bombing for the past 12 months. Enough is enough, this must stop now.”
In a joint statement on Wednesday, a coalition of 18 aid groups warned that the ongoing Israeli assault “will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in the north” and has already “prevented international and national humanitarian organizations from carrying out already very limited lifesaving aid operations.”
“The new orders have obstructed humanitarian actors from providing necessities such as health services, clean water, food, and nutrition services, taking away the remaining lifelines for the civilian population,” reads the statement signed by Oxfam, ActionAid, Islamic Relief, and more than a dozen other groups.
“Nowhere in Gaza is safe for civilians,” the coalition said. “Given the severity of the needs, humanitarian actors must be able to distribute aid and continue their work, without threat of displacement or military operations. The undersigned aid organizations urge all parties to the conflict to uphold their obligations to protect civilians and facilitate unhindered humanitarian access at all times.”
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
“The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful,” wrote one journalist.
As Hurricane Milton’s 145 mile-per-hour winds began closing in on Southwest Florida on Wednesday and people crowded into makeshift shelters across the state, climate advocates and other observers said the life-threatening storm and massive disruption to millions of people’s lives should make Americans “furious” at those who have helped make extreme weather more frequent and dangerous.
As Nathan J. Robinson wrote in Current Affairs, climate scientists and meteorologists have unequivocally told oil companies and policymakers that fossil fuel extraction is causing planetary heating, which has led to higher temperatures in oceans and bodies of water including the Gulf of Mexico, where the rapidly strengthening hurricane formed.
But despite the knowledge that fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil and Shell had decades ago that drilling for oil and gas would cause “violent weather” and “potentially catastrophic events,” the industry’s profits have only grown as the U.S. has continued to subsidize their pollution-causing activities.
“The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful,” wrote Robinson. “Many of them have children and grandchildren. Presumably they would like their descendants to inherit a world worth living in. And they could make that happen. Unfortunately, it would require challenging the power and profits of some of America’s most influential corporations.”
In the Substack newsletter Heated, Arielle Samuelson explained on Wednesday how fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating “mutated” Hurricane Milton, which stunned weather experts this week as its wind speeds grew at a record-breaking pace, from 60 miles per hour to 180 miles per hour in just 36 hours.
It was the second time in recent weeks that a hurricane in the region has intensified quickly; areas that are expected to take a direct hit from Milton are still overwhelmed by the destruction left by Hurricane Helene.
Hot temperatures in the planets’ oceans and gulfs fuels hurricanes, and as Samuelson noted, scientists say the “extremely hot” Gulf of Mexico “was made far more likely by heat-trapping pollutants from the fossil fuel, agriculture, chemical, and cement industries.”
She continued:
In the past two weeks, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 30-31° Celsius (86-88°F)—about 1 to 2° Celsius above average. The climate crisis made these extraordinarily high ocean temperatures at least 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks, according to a rapid attribution study from Climate Central.
[…]
The science is also extremely clear that heat-trapping pollution causes sea-level rise and heavier rainfall, both of which make hurricanes more dangerous. Rainfall rates for tropical cyclones are expected to rise with the planet’s temperature, causing deadly flash floods like those found in Asheville, North Carolina. Sea level rise also means that coastal communities, and communities further inland, are more likely to be flooded during a storm.
That’s an objectively scary reality. But we know the primary source of greenhouse gas pollution, scientists note, so we also know how to slow the problem.
The lingering destruction of Helene and the impending landfall of Milton come, noted Fossil Fuel Media director Jamie Henn, weeks after three Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to require fossil fuel companies and oil refiners that do business in the U.S. to pay into a $1 trillion Polluters Pay Climate Fund, with their contributions based on a percentage of their global emissions.
The fund would be used to finance climate adaptation and other efforts to confront the impacts of the climate crisis.
There is a bill in Congress *right now* that would fund FEMA and resiliency efforts by making Big Oil pay for climate damages.
The Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act would provide at least $15 billion to FEMA to "address climate related disasters." https://t.co/cza3eiGZCn
In a press briefing on Wednesday, President Joe Biden noted how the damage done by Helene and the rapidly evolving news about Milton has left overwhelmed Americans vulnerable to misinformation, with some urging them to direct their anger at the White House or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made baseless claims that FEMA funds were spent on funding for immigrant shelters, while U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on social media that an unnamed “they” can control the weather and suggested the federal government is deliberately keeping emergency aid from people in states controlled by Republicans.
As fossil fuel firms and political leaders march “us toward the tipping points,” wrote Robinson, “many people won’t understand what is happening to them.”
“In a chaotic information environment filled with endless falsehoods, they’ll conclude that the president is manipulating the weather, or FEMA is trying to kill people,” he wrote. “The real story, however, is straightforward: We have a political class that is vastly more committed to sending weapons to war criminals than funding emergency management, and which will not acknowledge the basic facts of the problem (and the known solutions) because some large economic actors benefit in the short run from the destruction of the planet.”
“Truly, it’s revolting,” he added. “What an absolute disgrace our failure to deal with climate change is.”
Candice Fortin, U.S. campaigns manager for 350.org, said that fossil fuel executives and the politicians that support them have “blood on their hands” and called on Biden to unequivocally stand on the side of hurricane victims by declaring a climate emergency.
“This is a climate emergency,” said Fortin. “Every time we repeat that, countless more lives have been lost or upended by the fossil fuel industry. How many more times will it take? We call on President Biden to use his executive power to declare a climate emergency so we can finally protect frontline communities.”
At Newsweek, organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg wrote that oil companies’ contributions to the climate emergency have been compounded by their vast efforts to spread misinformation and hide their knowledge that fossil fuel extraction was heating the planet.
Exxon CEO Darren Woods, he wrote, pushed for a surge in the company’s extractive activities while “overseeing a substantial portion of the company’s climate deception efforts,” and received $198.9 million for his “climate crimes” from 2015-23, as well as owning Exxon shares worth $371.1 million.
“Regular people are paying the ultimate price for this sociopathic greed,” wrote Regunberg. “The families made homeless, the wives and husbands and parents and children who lost loved ones to Helene—these victims deserve justice no less than victims of street-level crimes, and the companies and corporate executives responsible for their pain and suffering deserve criminal punishment at least as much as, if not far more than, the average street-level offender.”
“Climate victims have paid so much for Big Oil’s reckless conduct,” he added. “It’s time to make the polluters pay.”
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Relatives of Palestinians, who lost their life following the Israeli attack on Nuseirat Refugee Camp, mourn after the bodies are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for burial process in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on October 1, 2024 [Ashraf Amra – Anadolu Agency]
An unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe is imminent as the Israeli occupation regime tightens its siege on the Jabalia refugee camp and Beit Lahia project in the northern Gaza Strip for the fourth consecutive day, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned in a statement issued late on Tuesday. “Israel is accelerating the pace of its genocide against the Palestinians there by carrying out mass and planned killings, as well as widespread forced displacements,” said the rights group.
“The international community, led by the United Nations, must act swiftly and decisively to save tens of thousands of residents who are being subjected to one of the most violent campaigns of genocide that the Gaza Strip has ever witnessed,” Euro-Med insisted.
Israeli occupation forces have intensified their siege of the Jabalia camp and the surrounding neighbourhoods, including Tal Al-Zaatar, Al-Sikka, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. The Israeli forces have also taken up positions in the west of the Gaza Strip, advancing as far as the Jaffa Cemetery and the Tawam Junction.
With air strikes, fire belts and artillery shelling — bombing homes over the heads of their residents — the Israeli occupation forces have been in large parts of northern Gaza since Saturday evening.
Dozens of people have been killed and injured as a result of this ongoing invasion.
“Initial reports confirmed that five Palestinian citizens — including a woman, a man and his son — were killed by the occupation forces for trying to escape the Jabalia camp while waving white flags,” said Euro-Med. “They were executed.”
In an extremely dangerous development, Israeli troops ordered the complete evacuation of Kamal Adwan Hospital, located in the Beit Lahia project, north of Gaza. The director of the hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, reported that he received a call from the occupation forces telling him that if he did not get the patients and medical staff out of the hospital within a day, they would be in danger.
Along with two other hospitals in northern Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, Kamal Adwan Hospital is only partially operational after being raided and destroyed in the Israeli military’s first invasion of northern Gaza last December. On that occasion, the hospital’s medical staff, patients and displaced persons sheltering inside were mistreated severely by the occupation forces.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital is currently being besieged by Israeli quadcopter aircraft for the second day in a row, with smoke bombs being detonated at its gate and dozens of raids on nearby buildings,” the rights group pointed out.
The sole road that ambulances used to move dozens of seriously injured patients from Kamal Adwan Hospital to the Baptist Hospital has been cut off, following the Israeli bombing of a building in the vicinity. This was followed by the occupation forces’ tightening of the siege on the hospital, and the blocking of ambulances and any other methods of victim transport. Earlier on Tuesday, the occupation forces arrested a paramedic who was transporting patients from the Kamal Adwan Hospital to the Baptist Hospital, despite prior coordination with the Israeli authorities.
The Euro-Med Monitor field team received testimonies from citizens who were able to reach Gaza City about witnessing dead bodies lying in the streets. “They told us that they saw victims trapped beneath the debris of bombed-out houses, and that ambulance and civil defence crews were unable to reach the area as at least 20 houses were targeted by Israeli forces in a four-day period,” reported the NGO’s field staff.
Thousands of people trapped in the Jabalia and Beit Lahia camps are suffering from a near-total absence of food supplies, which were already scarce due to Israel’s closure of the border crossings. The limited amount of goods and other aid that had previously been allowed to enter the area was blocked by Israel for more than a week prior to the new invasion.
“Numerous families remain stuck in their homes, enduring harsh living conditions under the intensified and brutal Israeli bombing. Citizens are not even able to leave their homes in order to obtain water, and municipal crews and local committees are unable to assist them. As a result, thousands of residents face the threat of starvation, dehydration or death, knowing full well that they are all victims of the catastrophic effects of malnutrition brought on by Israel’s year-long starvation policy.”
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called on the UN and international community to shoulder their legal and moral obligations to put an end to the horrific crime of genocide being committed by the Israeli occupation, which has just entered its second year.
