Beechcraft King Air 350 Spy Plane currently being leased to surveil over Gaza.
Nuvpreet Kalra
Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s lie last month, that Britain was not providing intelligence to Israel, has been directly contradicted by government sources. He must resign.
Britain has been collecting intelligence over Gaza since October 2023 with near daily surveillance flights, totalling over 600. While the Ministry of Defence refused to say which aircrafts were being used, public flight tracking has revealed Shadow R1 surveillance planes have flown hundreds of spy missions over Gaza, taking off from and based at RAF Akrotiri, the British base on Cyprus.
This latest update comes as Palestine Deep Dive revealed the Shadow R1 spy planes had been removed from service and instead replaced by Beechcraft King Air 350 planes leased by the US-based Sierra Nevada Leasing Company, a subsidiary of US weapons manufacturer Sierra Nevada Corporation.
This significant finding also revealed the route of the spy planes over Gaza for the very first time, as the plane accidentally left its transmitter on. This plane’s path concentrated on Khan Younis, in an area that was directly bombed the following day. The secrecy shrouding the British surveillance operation is deliberate because it is concealing the direct participation of Britain in Israel’s genocide. This secrecy appears to be a motivation for outsourcing the spy planes from the RAF to the US leasing company. While the RAF planes were available to track publicly, these Sierra Nevada planes are not trackable.
Both governments since the beginning of the spy flights in October 2023 have been firmly concealing Britain’s role in surveillance. In December 2023, British journalists received a D-notice not to report on British Special Forces operating in West Asia, i.e. Gaza. The cowardly obedience of establishment media has left Britain’s support for massacres without substantial opposition.
On 22nd July, the Foreign Secretary Dammy Lammy was finally asked directly by BBC Radio 4 whether Britain was supplying Israel with intelligence. He lied and said no. We knew he was lying then, but now his government has directly contradicted him. It is an absolutely scandal for a government minister to publicly lie about active support for genocide, which has killed more than 60,000 people and decimated Gaza.
The role of British surveillance in aiding Israel’s massacres cannot be understated. In June 2024, a senior Israeli occupation official revealed that “the United States and Britain have been in Israel throughout the war, assisting Israeli intelligence in collecting and analysing information”. Another Israeli official said that the US and Britain have “been able to provide intelligence from the air and cyberspace that Israel cannot collect on its own”. The implications of a government facilitating “real-time information” for an entity committing a holocaust must be seriously addressed.
David Lammy must resign for lying to deliberately mislead the public over Britain’s role in supporting Israel’s genocide. We know that British spy planes provided surveillance which led to the Nuseriat massacre in June 2024, and just last week, a British spy plane flew over part of Khan Younis that was the next day targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
Lammy has deliberately misled the public. Now, his government is trying to hide it further. It is sickening that Lammy feigns concern for suffering in Gaza, while overseeing a critical component of Israeli’s genocide itself.
It is up to us to make this a crisis. We have to escalate our pressure against Lammy, Starmer, this entire government, and western imperialism. They will not get away with pulling the wool over our eyes. We know that Britain is spying on Gaza for Israel. And we will not let it continue.
We demand the International Criminal Court must investigate the extent of Britain’s surveillance support for Israel, and David Lammy resign immediately.
