Sherin Wafi (centre) and her daughter Mira (4) mourn during the funeral of her husband Hosam Wafi, who was killed by an Israeli strike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, June 2, 2025
Starmer should not need to wait for the High Court’s decision on F-35 parts in order to do the right thing, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
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According to the government’s “Strategic export controls: quarterly licensing statistics,” the UK sent more arms to Israel in the final three months of 2024, after the 8 per cent “ban,” than in all the preceding four years from 2020-23 combined. This escalation included the secret use of British military aircraft on at least seven occasions to deliver F-35 parts directly to Israel.
The government’s argument in court for the continued supply of F-35 parts to Israel has scraped through the bottom of even the toughest barrel. Its lawyers have argued that the “security” need to keep parts available around the world overrides Britain’s obligations, which are unequivocal under international law, to intervene to prevent genocide and war crimes and both that “no evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children” and that “there is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians,” despite Israel’s known heavy use of the heaviest US-made “dumb bombs” on densely populated civilian areas and the tent camps of refuges in supposed safe zones.
The government’s claim also flouts the clear evidence, provided by the United Nations as well as by every international, including Israeli human rights and humanitarian group, that Israel’s blockade is inflicting starvation on Gaza, putting huge numbers of civilians and especially children, at “imminent” risk of starving to death. According to Unicef in mid-May, “71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers … need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition.”
In reality, the British government could inflict rapid degradation on the ability of Israel to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza just by imposing a ban on parts for a single aircraft type, that would also send a clear message to other governments still prevaricating over their obligations to take every available action to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The effects of this action, both militarily and politically, would be massively amplified if Britain did its legal duty and imposed the complete arms embargo demanded by human rights groups and campaigners.
All of this is possible right now. The Starmer government should not need a court order before it does the self-evidently right thing, and it must not drag its feet while the court process grinds on and more civilians in Gaza are killed. Every socialist, every decent human being, must demand nothing less on the streets and directly to the British Parliament and of their MP.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Steve Witherden, MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, held a Parliamentary debate on British arms sales to Israel (Image: Parliament TV)
A WELSH Labour MP has called on the UK Government to suspend all arms sales to Israel to ensure that the UK is not “complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza”.
Steve Witherden, MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, held a Parliamentary debate on British arms sales to Israel on Monday evening, calling on the UK Government to suspend all arms exports.
During the debate, Witherden described Gaza as a “slaughterhouse” and said that the UK Government is still letting the “weapons flow” into Israel despite the country’s genocidal acts on Gaza.
Witherden also highlighted the lack of transparency surrounding the true extent of UK military exports to Israel, particularly regarding the supply of components for the F-35 fighter jet programme, and urged ministers to outline the specific conditions that would trigger a halt to further exports.
“The Government have claimed that there are red lines that would trigger a halt to exports, but Gaza is already a slaughterhouse,” Witherden said.
“Children are emaciated or dying of hunger, hospitals have been intentionally destroyed and Israel’s leaders vow to wipe out Gaza, and still the weapons flow, so finally, Minister, where is our red line?”
The Labour MP added: “I call on this Government to suspend all arms exports to Israel, to ensure that no British-made weapons are used in Israel’s brutal plans to annex, starve and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg speaks surrounded by other participants in the latest Freedom Flotilla Coalition effort to deliver shipborne aid to Gaza, during a June 1, 2025 press conference in Catania, Italy. (Photo: Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
“No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide,” said climate activist Greta Thunberg, who is aboard the Madleen.
A dozen Palestine defenders including climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and a French lawmaker set sail from Sicily on Sunday aboard a boat carrying humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, many of whom are starving amid Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege and decadeslong naval blockade of the coastal enclave.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) said it launched the sailboat Madleen—named after Gaza’s first and only known fisherwoman—from Catania, Italy at 4:00 pm local time Sunday “in direct defiance of Israel’s illegal and genocidal blockade.”
“Madleen symbolizes the unyielding spirit of Palestinian resilience and the growing global resistance to Israel’s use of collective punishment and deliberate starvation policies,” FFC said in a statement Sunday. “The ship is carrying urgently needed supplies for the people of Gaza, including baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, women’s sanitary products, water desalination kits, medical supplies, crutches, and children’s prosthetics.”
The international volunteers aboard Madleen include Thunberg, French Member of European Parliament Rima Hassan, German refugee advocate and FFC steering committee member Yasemin Acar, Brazilian FFC steering committee member Thiago Ávila, Al Jazeera reporter Omar Fayad, French doctor Baptiste Andre, French journalist Yanis M’Hamdi, Turkish engineer Şuayb Ordu, and crew members Mark Van Rennes, Reva Seifert Viard, Pascal Maurieras, and Sergio Toribio.
“I am aboard Madleen because silence is not neutrality—it is complicity,” said Hassan, who is banned from entering Israel due to her outspoken support for Palestinian rights. “The Palestinian people in Gaza are being starved and slaughtered, and the world watches. This ship is not just carrying aid, it is carrying a demand: End the blockade. End the genocide.”
Thunberg said that “we are seeing a systematic starvation of 2 million people. The world cannot be silent bystanders, Every single one of us has a moral obligation to do everything we can to fight for a free Palestine.”
The Madleen‘s launch came a month after the Conscience, another FCC aid vessel traveling in international waters off Malta, was attacked twice, presumably by Israeli forces. No one was harmed in what FFC said was a drone strike on the ship. However, the activists were forced to abort their humanitarian mission. Israel has not commented on the incident.
Madleen also set sail nearly 15 years to the day after Israeli forces raided a Gaza Freedom Flotilla convoy carrying humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza. The attack—which also came in international waters—left nine people including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan dead.
FFC said Sunday that the “unarmed and nonviolent” mission “poses no threat” and “sails in full accordance with international law. Any attack or interference will be a deliberate, unlawful assault on civilians.”
Those aboard the Madleen said they were aware of the dangers they faced. Israel has killed numerous Western activists and journalists who document its human rights violations over the years, and just last month Israeli troops opened fire on a group of international diplomats visiting the illegally occupied West Bank two days after three involved countries issued an ultimatum to stop annihilating Gaza.
“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” a tearful Thunberg said during a Sunday press conference. “Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity.”
“And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide,” she added.
Activist Greta Thunberg says silence is more dangerous than sailing to Gaza, as she boarded a vessel that will try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla had to abandon its last attempt on May 2 when it was bombed. pic.twitter.com/ieecZ8ps0E
Some Israelis and their supporters took to social media to wish harm upon the activists. In the United States, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alluded to past Israeli attacks on Gaza aid flotillas in a social media post saying, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!”
Israel strongly refutes allegations that it is committing genocide in Gaza. South Africa has filed, and dozens of nations support, a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination and starvation as a weapon of war, in Gaza.
Officials in Gaza say that more than 192,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured since Israel launched its assault and siege following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, a figure that includes at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble and hundreds of mostly children who have died from acute malnutrition and lack of medical care.
Around 2 million Gazans have also been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, amid Israel’s campaign to starve, conquer, indefinitely occupy, ethnically cleanse, and possibly recolonize the coastal strip.
Each side accuses the other of thwarting cease-fire efforts. On Saturday, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff rejected what he called Hamas’ “totally unacceptable” proposal for a truce in which 10 living and 18 dead Israeli hostages would be exchanged for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy toldDemocracy Now! on Monday that a cease-fire proposal mediated by Witkoff is “a bad deal for the Palestinians that will allow Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza” and “walks back the commitment for a permanent cease-fire, Israeli withdrawal, and allowing in of humanitarian aid.”
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Foreign Secretary David Lammy meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, July 2024. (Credit: Ben Dance via Flickr.)
As British establishment opinion begins to turn against Israel, the hypocrisy shown by government figures like Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who long defended Israeli brutality, is both ironic and infuriating.
Earlier this month the foreign secretary, David Lammy, described Israel’s latest assault on Gaza as ‘intolerable’ and ‘monstrous’ in Parliament. Noting his apparent pain — ‘as a lifelong friend of Israel’ — at having to issue such a statement, he decried the futility of military strategy in recovering the Israeli hostages and defeating Hamas. He condemned the Netanyahu government and labelled the far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich an ‘extremist’. Leaning over the aisle for emphasis, he admonished his Tory counterpart, Priti Patel, for being insufficiently critical of Israel. Lammy announced: ‘We are crystal clear: what is happening is morally wrong, unjustifiable, and it needs to stop.’
Anyone observing the words and actions of the Labour Party over the last nineteen months — in both opposition and government — is likely to have experienced some cognitive dissonance upon hearing such comments. In Lammy’s Tottenham constituency, where I live, he has repeatedly ignored residents’ concerns about his support for Israel, only rarely appearing at heavily stage-managed local events, and cancelling many others. Most of Lammy’s Westminster speech could have accurately applied to Israel’s behaviour at almost any point since it launched its brutal and wildly disproportionate onslaught in October 2023.
So why the sudden change of tone? How did Lammy — and the Labour hierarchy more generally — come to stand so belatedly in opposition to Israeli brutality, after nearly two years of condoning, apologising, and flip-flopping on the war in Gaza?
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But while the condemnation of Israel’s behaviour may be a watershed, the lack of concrete action to oppose the Israeli genocide is far more significant. Any serious response would include, at the very least, a full arms embargo, massive diplomatic pressure, and a refugee resettlement scheme for displaced Palestinians.
But perhaps more Machiavellian motivations are behind the continuing shifts and ambiguities in the Lammyite line on Israel. Pausing talks on a future trade deal leaves the UK’s existing trading relationship with Israel intact. As several backbenchers have noted, there is a logical chasm between the government’s newfound revulsion at Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its continued material support for those operations. While some arms export licences were suspended in September 2024, the three months that followed saw the sale of more military equipment than the total approved by the Tory government between 2020 and 2023. The UK has continued to supply 15 percent of the components to the global pool of F-35 fighter jets used to lethal effect in Gaza — a position defended in court only a few days before Lammy’s tub-thumping speech, essentially arguing that those exports trumped the duty to prevent genocide.
On the same day as the high court hearing, Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, spoke at an event for Israel’s Independence Day — commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba Day — during which she celebrated the RAF’s surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. The government maintains that these flights, operating out of the RAF’s Cyprus base, are solely used for intelligence relating to the recovery of Israeli hostages, but it has rebuffed parliamentary inquiries into their exact purpose. Action on Armed Violence has reported at least 518 surveillance flights since December 2023, including 24 in the two weeks before Israel’s attack on Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians.
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 and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Sherin Wafi (centre) and her daughter Mira (4) mourn during the funeral of her husband Hosam Wafi, who was killed by an Israeli strike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, June 2, 2025
