The value of UK arms imported by Israel has reached a record high value in 2025, FactCheck can exclusively reveal.
Our analysis of Israel Tax Authority customs data finds that Israel imported nearly £1 million worth of UK munitions in the first nine months of the year.
That’s more than double the amount received in any of the previous three years.
Last week, FactCheck revealed that Israel imported over £400,000 worth of arms from UK companies in June 2025 – the highest monthly amount since these records began in January 2022.
The exact nature of the items wasn’t specified in the data, but they were listed under a category that includes bombs, grenades, torpedoes, missiles, and ammunition.
Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 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.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
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Thousands of demonstrators gather at the Sebin Street after Friday prayers to show solidarity with Palestinians and protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza, following a call of the Iranian-backed Houthis in Sanaa, Yemen on March 08, 2024. [Mohammed Hamoud – Anadolu Agency]
A Hebrew report said the Houthis have transferred missiles, rocket launchers, drone systems, and other equipment to several provinces, while restoring communication and technology infrastructure damaged by US strikes.
According to Line of Defence, a platform specialised in security and military affairs, Yemeni security sources said on Sunday that the Ansar Allah movement (Houthis) moved advanced weapons and military equipment to the western coastal areas overlooking the Red Sea. They also redeployed naval, coastal, and defensive munitions in the western mountain range.
The platform quoted the sources as saying the Houthis had relocated missiles, rocket systems, drone technology, and guidance equipment to Hodeidah and Hajjah provinces, as well as to western areas of Raymah, Dhamar, Mahwit, and Ibb, in addition to the parts of Taiz under their control. The report, published by Maariv, questioned whether the Houthis were preparing for a long-term confrontation.
The report added that the transferred weapons also included “missile batteries and radar systems” positioned near Hodeidah city, its port, and several areas in the north. It noted that the Houthis also redeployed naval and aerial assets in key strategic mountain locations overlooking the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, placing them in secure bases and shelters, some of which are new.
Article by Chris Hedges republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.
In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.
What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s armingISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.
I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.
We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.
There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.
I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.
This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.
And how will we remember? By not remembering.
Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.
Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.
You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.
Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.
“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”
Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?
What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?
It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.
“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:
To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.
There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.
At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.
Feature photo | The Last Piece | Artwork by Mr. Fish
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
Article by Chris Hedges republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
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.
President Joe Biden (right) listens as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (left) speaks during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, September 26, 2024
IT SCARCELY gets more dangerous than this. The semi-senile President of the United States has determined to use his remaining months in office to dramatically ratchet up the war in Ukraine.
Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire US-supplied missiles deep into Russia, permission it has hitherto withheld, is a major step towards extending the conflict into an actual face-off between the world’s two major nuclear-armed powers.
Since the missiles concerned cannot easily be operated without full US logistical, intelligence and targeting support, this takes the prolonged proxy war much closer to a direct clash.
Biden’s move looks likely to be echoed, as ever, by Keir Starmer, who has been prevented by Washington from allowing Ukraine to use British Storm Shadow missiles to hit targets inside Russia. Those restrictions may now be cast aside.
Starmer is talking of “doubling down” on the war at the precise moment when hopes for an end to a bloody and unnecessary conflict should be rising.
…
The people must press for peace in Ukraine as a matter of urgency, on the basis of stable security for all. That is already the demand of most of the world’s nations, and it must be imposed on Labour’s warlords.
‘Thought of the Day’ is a feature of BBC Radio 4 news at early in the morning. It usually features some religious nutter spouting some very simplistic religious rubbish. It’s a sermon and sermons are usually fantastic babbliing by mad people. The trouble is – of course – that the presentation is within their particular religious framework often with no regard for logic or reason. It used to drive me mad – I’d be thinking “You’re so biased and short-sighted, can’t you see <WHATEVER>?”. I’ve just heard “Prayer for the Day” for the first time ever because I’m up so early, need to remember to change channel in future.
So here I am giving my own thoughts of the day. While I realise that I am regarded very highly be some of my valued audience, you are so welcome to disagree. I want you to disagree. Make notes. He’s wrong on this, this and this. That’s not how it works because … <YOUR REASONING>. Don’t just disagree, know exactly why and what you disagree with, be able to argue what points you disagree with me.
It’s a real shame that you can’t comment on this blog – that’s because comments are censored probably by UK’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper with the full knowledge and agreement of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. That’s a topic for another Thoughts of the Day, let’s just say that it doesn’t really conform with human rights laws, does it? No doubt that there’s some justification for it … OK let’s leave it for now and discuss it soon on some laterer Thoughts of the Day. I’ve also not forgotten that I’m supposed to write a piece on carbon capture and storage but I have been and am still quite ill.
Back to the point, let’s have some thoughts of the day, more thoughts of the day I suppose.
Firstly, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes do you? United States providing a missile interception capability to Israel, drones and rockets getting through …
Trying to find an appropriate nickname for Kamala Harris who fully supports Israel’s genocide.
Secondly, I think that we should regard public statements by US and UK on Israel to be intended to deceive and mislead. Their actions prove that they’re talking total BS in public. USUK militaries are participating as much as the IDF FFS.
Thirdly, I think that WW3 is on the cards. I was expecting it a few weeks ago actually and it’s getting on a bit really re: the presidential election. People get scared and tend to vote with what they’ve got if there’s a war on. Russia and North Korea [ed and China] will be on Iran’s side. Russia has got some of it’s fleet there already. I know from keeping up with the news that Russia has got some F.O. serious new missiles the capabilities of which have yet to be demonstrated.
There’s a protest on 2 November. I’ve got a bus ticket and some walking boots on the way.
