Declassified UK Exclusive: New study reveals the scale of British intelligence gathering above Gaza, raising fears of complicity in Israeli war crimes
The Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted at least 518 surveillance flights around Gaza since December 2023, an investigation by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) for Declassified UK has found.
The flights, carried out by 14 Squadron’s Shadow R1 aircraft from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, have been shrouded in secrecy, raising concerns about whether British intelligence has played a role in Israeli military operations that have resulted in mass civilian casualties in Gaza.
These revelations come as Israel faces allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC), with warrants issued for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
The UK government insists that the flights are purely for hostage recovery, but the lack of transparency has done little to allay suspicions that the intelligence gathered may be facilitating Israeli attacks.
Surveillance sorties continued during and after the ceasefire, despite Israel’s renewed bombing of Gaza killing hundreds of children.
Over 500 missions in 15 months
AOAV’s analysis of flight-tracking data shows that between 3 December 2023 and 27 March 2025, the RAF carried out at least 518 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) flights over or close to Gaza’s airspace.
Both Labour and Conservative governments have enacted the policy, with at least 215 flights taking place during Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister and 303 under Rishi Sunak’s administration.
The frequency of flights remained high throughout 2024, with some months seeing as many as 49 sorties. The missions have typically lasted up to six hours, with the longest flight recorded at seven hours and four minutes.
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
International Center of Justice for Palestinians director Tayab Ali (right) and ICJP Canada human rights lawyer Shane Martinez (left) take part in the launch of Global 195 in London on March 18, 2025. (Photo: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected,” one of the initiative’s founders lamented.
Lawyers from half a dozen countries on Tuesday launched a coalition dedicated to bringing Israelis and dual nationals accused of war crimes in Palestine to justice.
The U.K.-based International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) hosted a launch event in London for the new initiative, called Global 195. ICJP said lawyers will “pursue Israeli war crimes suspects across the world” via arrest warrant applications and the initiation of legal proceedings including private prosecutions against implicated members and veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as well as “figures spanning the entire Israeli military and political chain of command, from senior policymakers to operational personnel, who are directly or indirectly responsible for violations of international law.”
Participants include attorneys from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Malaysia, Norway, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, where “advanced preparations have already been made to pursue legal action against British citizens suspected of joining the IDF or committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.”
For the past 18 months, ICJP has been collecting evidence as part of its Justice for Gaza campaign, including 135 eyewitness testimonies backed by open-source intelligence. Documented violations of international law include indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing of civilians, attacks on designated “safe zones,”s airstrikes targeting refugee camps, use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.
“The obstruction of international legal institutions in pursuing individuals responsible for war crimes in Palestine, coupled with the failure of national police forces to fulfill their obligations under humanitarian law and universal jurisdiction principles, has allowed impunity for Israeli suspected war criminals to persist,” ICJP director Tayab Ali said in a statement.
I wholeheartedly welcome Global 195 . Justice for Palestine starts "at home", and it will be delivered in every country it is needed. https://t.co/ed1S8mcVKM
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) March 19, 2025
“Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected,” Ali added. “The launch of Global 195 is a necessary legal intervention to remedy this failure. By activating domestic legal mechanisms across multiple jurisdictions, we are ensuring that those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza are subject to legal accountability and no longer have anywhere to hide.”
Huseyin Disli, vice president of the Worldwide Lawyers Association, noted that “no domestic court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli genocide war criminals, exposing the failure of the international legal order” and called the global legal community “incoherent in its goals.”
Israel is currently the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case filed by South Africa, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last November issued arrest warrants over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. However, key nations including the United States—which has not ratified the Rome Statute upon which the ICC is based—have ignored the warrants, and last month the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the tribunal.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On Tuesday, Israel unilaterally abandoned an eight-week cease-fire and resumed its assault on Gaza, killing more than 400 people including at least 174 children in airstrikes that wiped out entire families.
The launch of Global 195 follows the establishment last September of the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based legal group that pursues arrest warrants for alleged Israeli war criminals traveling abroad. The organization is named after a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed—along with six relatives—by Israeli forces in January 2024 while trying to flee to safety in a car. Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed.
Protesters demonstrate demanding justice for drug war victims, after the arrest of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, in Quezon City on March 11, 2025. (Photo: Earvin Perias / AFP)
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant… shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice,” said one human rights advocate.
On Tuesday, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by local authorities at Manila’s international airport after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity. News of his arrest prompted some observers to urge the arrest of another public figure who faces ICC charges: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Duterte case will pose a test for the court, according to The New York Times. In the past six months, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the military junta in Myanmar.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote “Perhaps Netanyahu and Gallant will be next…” in response to the news. Danny Shaw, a professor at City University of New York, posted a video of Duterte’s arrest and wrote: “Why don’t they arrest Netanyahu?”
Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader at the Dutch peace organization PAX, wrote, “now do Netanyahu.”
On Tuesday night, Duterte was placed on a plane that was bound for The Hague, where the court is headquartered, per the Times, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.
The ICC has accused Duterte of crimes against humanity during his time as president and when he was the mayor of the city of Davao. During his tenure as president, from 2016 to 2022, Duterte’s security forces carried out thousands of killings that his government cast as drug-related cases. In a 2017 report, Human Rights Watch described his “war on drugs” as effectively “a campaign of extrajudicial execution in impoverished areas of Manila and other urban areas.” Philippine National Police officers and unidentified “vigilantes” killed over 7,000 people between the start of his term and the release of that Human Rights Watch report, according to the group.
In 2017, Duterte earned praise from U.S. President Donald Trump, who told him in a phone call that he was doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to reporting at the time.
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant is a hopeful sign for victims in the Philippines and beyond. It shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice, wherever they are in the world,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary general of the human rights group Amnesty International, in a statement Tuesday. “At a time when too many governments renege on their ICC obligations while others attack or sanction international courts, Duterte’s arrest is a huge moment for the power of international law.”
Duterte’s former chief legal counsel and presidential spokesperson, Salvador Panelo, said that the “ICC has no jurisdiction in the Philippines,” in part because “the country withdrew as an ICC member state in 2018,” according to a post on social media.
According to the Times, the court says the case only considers alleged crimes from the time when the country was still part of the court.
According to a copy of he warrant, which was obtained by the Times, three judges of the ICC said they believed Duterte “was responsible for the drug war killings that took place when he was president and mayor of Davao, and that there were reasonable grounds to believe that these attacks were ‘both widespread and systematic.'”
The government itself, in 2022, said that over 6,200 “drug suspects” were killed during Duterte’s war on drugs starting in 2016. Rights groups put the total number of people who died much higher, in the tens of thousands, according to PBS.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A United Nations vehicle accompanies aid convoys in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, during the delivery of humanitarian aid after a ceasefire, January 22, 2025 [SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images]
International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire world’s political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.
In principle, international law should always have been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism practically to enslave the Global South for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonisation of the South.
From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war on Libya and numerous other examples, past and present, the UN was often used as a platform for the strong to impose their will on the weak. And whenever smaller countries fought back collectively, as the UN General Assembly often does, those with veto power in the Security Council and military and economic leverage used their advantage to coerce the rest based on the maxim “might is right”.
It should, therefore, hardly be a surprise to see many intellectuals and politicians in the Global South arguing that, aside from paying lip service to peace, human rights and justice, international law has always been irrelevant.
This irrelevance was put on full display through 15 months of a relentless Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza that killed and wounded over 160,000 people, a number that, according to several credible medical journals and studies, is expected to rise dramatically.
Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation into “plausible genocide” in Gaza on 26 January, 2024, followed by a decisive ruling on 19 July regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the international system began showing a pulse, however faint. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in November were more proof that West-centred legal institutions are capable of change.
The angry American response to all of this was predictable.
Washington has been fighting against international accountability for many years. The US Congress under the George W Bush administration passed a law as early as 2002 that shielded US soldiers “against criminal prosecution” by the ICC, to which the US is not a party. The so-called Hague Invasion Act authorised the use of military force to rescue American citizens or military personnel detained by the ICC.
Naturally, many of Washington’s measures to pressure, threaten or punish international institutions have been linked to shielding Israel under various guises. The global outcry and demands for accountability following Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, have once again put Western governments on the defensive. For the first time, Israel has been facing the kind of scrutiny that has rendered it, in many respects, a pariah state.
Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society merely for advocating the enforcement of international law.
Those targeted included UN-affiliated human rights defenders.
On 18 February, German police descended on the Junge Welt venue in Berlin as if they were about to apprehend a notorious criminal. They surrounded the building in full gear, sparking a bizarre drama that should have never taken place in a country that perceives itself as democratic. The reason behind the security mobilisation was none other than Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer and an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Ms Albanese also happens to be the current UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. If it were not for the UN’s intervention, she could have been arrested simply for demanding that Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.
Germany, however, is not an exception. Other Western powers, lead amongst them the US, are taking part in this moral crisis. Washington has taken serious and troubling steps, not only to protect Israel and itself from accountability to international law, but also to punish the very international institutions, its judges and officials for daring to question Israel’s behaviour.
Indeed, as recently as 13 February, the US sanctioned the ICC’s chief prosecutor due to his stance on Israel. After some hesitance, Karim Khan did what no other ICC prosecutor had done before when he issued those arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. They are currently wanted for “crimes against humanity and war crimes”.
The moral crisis deepens when the judges become the accused, as Khan found himself at the receiving end of endless Western media attacks and abuse, in addition to US sanctions.
As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining.
There is an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed, based on new standards, justice that applies to all and accountability that is expected from and for all.
Those who continue to support Israel have practically disowned international law altogether. The consequences of their decisions are dire. But for the rest of humanity, the Gaza war can spark a global reckoning, and provide the opportunity to reconstruct a more equitable world, one that is not moulded by those who are powerful militarily, but by the need to stop senseless killings of innocent children, women and the elderly.
An Israeli soldier carries a U.S.-supplied 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/ AFP via Getty Images)
Like the Biden administration, Trump is claiming an “emergency” in order to bypass Congress.
As Palestinians released from Israeli imprisonment recount torture and other abuse suffered at the hands of their former captors, the Trump administration on Friday approved a new $3 billion weapons package for Israel.
The new package, reported by Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker, includes nearly $2.716 billion worth of bombs and weapons guidance kits, as well as $295 million in bulldozers. The Trump administration said that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale,” allowing it to bypass Congress, as the Biden administration did on multiple occasions. However, the weapons won’t be delivered until 2026 or 2027.
The Trump-Vance State Department just approved $3.01 billion in arms & equipment sales to Israel$2.04 billion in bombs$675.7 million in bombs & weapon guidance kits$295 million in bulldozersAdministration said "an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale," waiving congressional review
From October 2023 to October 2024, Israel received a record $17.9 billion worth of U.S. arms as it waged a war of annihilation against the Gaza Strip that left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more displaced, starved, or sickened. Israel is facing genocide allegations in an International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Reporting on the new package came after U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday announced an effort to block four other arms sales totaling $8.56 billion in offensive American weaponry to Israel.
Meanwhile, some of the approximately 1,000 Palestinians released by Israel as part of a prisoner swap described grim stories of abuse by Israeli forces. The former detainees, who were arrested but never charged with any crimes, “have returned visibly malnourished and scarred by the physical and psychological torture they say they faced in Israeli prisons,” according to The Washington Post. Some returned to what were once their homes to find them destroyed and their relatives killed or wounded by Israeli forces.
Eyas al-Bursh, a doctor volunteering at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City when he was captured by Israeli troops, was held in Sde Teiman and the Ofer military prison in the illegally occupied West Bank for 11 months.
“The places where we were held were harsh, sleep was impossible, and we remained handcuffed and blindfolded,” al-Bursh told the Post.
“We endured psychological and physical torture without a single day of respite—whether through beatings, abuse, punches, or even verbal insults and humiliation,” he added.
The Israel Defense Forces told the Post that it “acts in accordance with Israeli and international law in order to protect the rights of the detainees held in the detention and questioning facilities.”
However, farmer Ashraf al-Radhi, who was held for 14 months—including at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in Israel’s Negev Desert—told the Post that “we witnessed all kinds of humiliation.”
According to the newspaper:
Radhi said he “wished for death” during his detention, which included long periods when he was blindfolded, handcuffed, andcrammed into a filthy cell with dozens of other prisoners. The 34-year-old said he had no access to a lawyer; no idea why he was there; or what, in his absence, had become of his family.
Rahdi also said that Mohammed al-Akka, a 44-year-old detainee held with him, died last December. Al-Akka is one of dozens of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli custody, some from suspected torture and, in at least one case, rape with an electric baton. A number of Israeli reservists are being investigated for the alleged gang-rape of a Sde Teiman prisoner.
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