Britain continues to run near daily surveillance flights over Gaza with the help of a US contractor at a time of growing questions about how the intelligence obtained is used and shared with the Israeli military.
Specialist flight trackers estimate that RAF Shadow aircraft have run more than 600 flights over the Palestinian territory from the Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus in an attempt to locate the remaining hostages held by Hamas since December 2023.
Spy flights were started under the Conservatives but have continued under Labour with few details shared publicly, at a rate of about two a day at first but dropping to one a day more recently, specialist trackers said.
Surveillance was transferred to a US contractor, Sierra Nevada Corporation, in late July to reduce costs and RAF sources indicated that it continues most days in an equivalent aircraft. But within days there was a mistake when the new spy plane was revealed to be circling over Khan Younis on 28 July.
Until that time the spy planes’ transponders were turned off halfway into their flight from Akrotiri heading towards Gaza over the eastern Mediterranean. But the mistake meant that “the RAF (now contracted) flights could be confirmed over Gaza, not just adjacent to Gaza,” said the flight tracker and analyst Steffan Watkins.
A subsequent tightening of security has made tracking flights more complicated, though on 3, 4, and 6 August the spy plane turned its transponders on and off before leaving Akrotiri, Watkins added.
RAF Shadows are used for optical surveillance, day or night, often in support of SAS operations. One defence source said they were being “trained on individual buildings” in Gaza in an attempt to determine if there was any signs of life from the 20 hostages still thought to be alive.
Jeremy Corbyn, the co-leader of an unnamed new left political party, said “the UK’s continued military cooperation with Israel is utterly indefensible” as “a genocide is livestreamed around the world”. The former Labour leader said: “We still don’t know why these flights are continuing and what intelligence is being provided.”
Helen Maguire, the defence spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said while she supported UK efforts to locate the remaining hostages, “the government must outline what steps it has taken to ensure Israel can’t use UK-sourced intelligence for its military operations in Gaza”.
The surveillance flights were first announced by the former defence secretary Grant Shapps in December 2023, in support of Israel, a country with a sophisticated intelligence operation of its own. No detail has been provided as to how the spy planes assisted Israel, which has rescued eight hostages since October 2023.
The UK government says it takes careful steps to control what it shares with Israel. Asked specifically about the surveillance flights last month, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “It would be quite wrong for the British government to assist in the prosecution of this war in Gaza. We are not doing that. I would never do that.”
Military insiders said a normal process for sharing UK intelligence with Israel or another foreign country would include checks from a political adviser (a trained civil servant) and a lawyer in an exercise that one said could take “minutes, hours or days”.
The British source added “why on earth would we want to get involved in a conflict where there are accusations of genocide and breaches of international humanitarian law?” while adding that if Richard Hermer, the attorney general, had raised serious concerns it would be unlikely the flights would continue.
Passing on information of military utility to Israel would arguably make the UK a party to the ongoing war, though once passed over the use to which intelligence can be put by a third party cannot be completely controlled.
The Labour backbencher Kim Johnson said it was “deeply concerning that surveillance flights over Gaza continue relentlessly, even as serious questions remain about their purpose and oversight – particularly when we’ve spent months demanding an end to the use of RAF Akrotiri to share intelligence with Israel during its genocidal onslaught on Gaza”.
The Ministry of Defence did not comment, but indicated that it was conducting unarmed surveillance flights over Gaza for the purpose of locating hostages and that it controls what information is passed to Israeli authorities. The Attorney General’s Office said it did not comment on legal advice provided to other ministers.
