Alfie Howis & Nuvpreet Kalra
Declassified’s excellent documentary reveals the reality of the British Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs), colonial remnants of the British Empire on the island, and how these outposts are used to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks across West Asia.
This week, Declassified UK released a new documentary with major revelations of the extensive role of British surveillance operation over Gaza. Phil Miller and Alex Morris, journalists with Declassified UK, travel to Cyprus and spend hours besides the Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri, the British military base on the island, where they capture the British-contracted spy plane take off.
Since December 2024, the British government has been contracting its surveillance operation over Gaza to a US military company based, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), based in Reno, Nevada. This contract has been deliberately opaque, with very little information at all on its contents. The only reason we know about the contract is because of an article by Matt Kennard and Abdullah Farooq for Palestine Deep Dive in August of this year, which found that SNC were flying British spy flights because one of the pilots forgot to turn the plane’s transponder off. The spy planes turn their transponders off during flights, unlike the RAF spy planes, save for brief flashes known as squawks when they are on the tarmac. It has been impossible to know for certain if this correlates to a spy plane flying—until now.
Just outside of RAF Akrotiri, Phil and Alex capture footage of a SNC spy planes taking off, just after a squawk, during a night-long campout which has unravelled efforts to obscure these flights from public scrutiny. Crucially, this is visual evidence that the SNC spy planes were regularly flying over Gaza in the months before the ceasefire. Declassified reveal this evidence means we can now confirm the existence of 115 more spy flights, paid for by the British government.
Through interviews, open source intelligence, and on-the-ground investigation, Declassified unveil how the spy plans have the capability to transmit intelligence in real-time, likely streaming video and radar feeds directly to the Israeli occupation military. Once this data is handed over, in this case almost instantaneously as it is taken, the RAF cannot control what it is used for by Israel. As examined in the film, in many cases, these spy flights, both when conducted by the RAF and SNC, have coincided with civilian massacres in Gaza.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has refused to release any of the data gathered in the flights, despite repeated requests. Declassified interviewed the father of Jim Henderson, the British aid worker with World Central Kitchen who killed in Gaza by a targeted Israeli airstrike on their aid convoy. His family, and those of the other British casualties of the strike, have been fighting for an investigation into the killings. Despite revealing they have flight data from the day of the killing, the MoD refuse to share it, keeping families in the dark about the deaths to shield Britain’s genocidal ally. As astutely put in the documentary, “if British victims of Israeli war crimes are being denied access to potential evidence, what chance do Palestinian victims have?” This is why our Bases Off Cyprus campaign has a petition calling on the International Criminal Court to demand Britain share their footage over Gaza — we know that Britain will not act until it is legally compelled to.
In the documentary, Declassified also visits RAF Troodos, a joint British and American base situated on the highest point in Cyprus, Mount Olympus. The base has commanding views over the whole island and into the Eastern Mediterranean, deeming it a key node of GCHQ and NSA surveillance of the whole region. This base is not in the SBAs but is in Cypriot territory, demonstrating the culpability of the Cypriot government in the UK-US spying operation. Cyprus is selling off its strategic geography to be utilised for genocide in Gaza and in countless illegal bombings across West Asia.
This hugely important documentary draws needed attention to the physical manifestations of the British bases on Cyprus. Tall fences crisscrossing hills, roaring fighter jet engines, military police patrols, flags flying over occupied land, and distant views of occupying soldiers enjoying beers at their private beach bar seen through razor wire and polluted wasteland. Sprawling, faceless compounds with threatening signs sit next to some of Cyprus’s most important nature reserves, and massive white domes conceal some of the most sophisticated spying equipment in the world. Legal grey areas obscure the rights of Cypriots to know what is happening on their land, with no accountability mechanisms or democratic oversight of the territory. Political will in Cyprus for changes to this status quo appear weak, with the Cypriot government closely aligned with Israel, Greece, and France against Turkey.
The genocide in Gaza has draw attention to the British bases in Cyprus and their past and current role in war and imperialism in West Asia, magnifying the movement for their dissolution and the broader struggle for completion of Cypriot national liberation from Britain. This film is an important snapshot of that struggle and an insight into the situation at ground-zero of British militarism and its consequences. This context may feel abstract to campaigners and the wider public in Britain and the US, but by highlighting the physicality of the bases we can imbue the visceral, emotional, and violent reality of the bases which can help provoke action in the imperial core. The roaring jets in the night and the blinking lights of Akrotiri’s runway guiding anonymous killers back from their murderous journeys across the sea bring home what we are fighting against and the inhumanity of our enemies.
Declassified UK are doing vital work that the mainstream media is not. Watch the documentary on YouTube here.
This documentary has given our movement the critical knowledge where traditional media has been silent. Join our campaign to get these bases off cyprus!
Alfie Howis is a writer and organiser with CODEPINK Britain.
Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s Digital Content Producer and co-ordinator for the international Bases off Cyprus campaign.
