Unreported in the mainstream media, the British military is directly participating in the genocide in Gaza: 

• The UK signed a secret military cooperation agreement with Israel in 2020, the details of which have never been made public.
  • The agreement aims at “strengthening military ties” with Israel, according to the UK government.
• The RAF are flying near-daily flights over Gaza, gathering intelligence on behalf of the IDF.
  • This intelligence is helping to facilitate massacres such as that conducted in the Nuseirat refugee camp on June 8th 2024, in which almost 300 Palestinians were killed and 700 wounded.
• RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus is the main conduit for the transfer of weapons to Israel, without which the genocide could not continue
  • Since the start of the genocide, Britain has transferred an extra 500 soldiers to this base, presumably to help with the additional work generated by the bombing campaign
• The UK has flown over sixty huge military planes, mostly vast cargo vehicles, to Tel Aviv since the start of the genocide
  • The MoD has admitted that these planes have carried “UK armed forces personnel conducting ….defence engagement.”
  • The flights from Cyprus alone had the capacity of transporting 4300 soldiers, “likely to include elite SAS troops,” according to Declassified UK.
  • The cargo planes are also capable of carrying heavy weaponry including helicopters and tanks. 
• Israeli military officers are being trained on British soil. 
• The UK government regularly signs off on weapons deliveries to Israel.
  • 42 new military export licences were granted in the first eight months of Israel’s latest bombing and siege campaign against the Gazan population. 

All the above is official British government policy. In Britain, policy is made by the cabinet, and all members of cabinet are collectively responsible for it. This means that, as a Cabinet minister, Oxford East MP Anneliese Dodds is now fully signed up to Britain’s policy of direct military involvement in the genocide. She is directly culpable for the daily massacres and famine we see unfolding across Gaza and directly implicated in these war crimes in Gaza. 

At the time of writing (19th July 2024), over 500 Palestinians have been reported killed by Israel in the past week alone. In total, almost 40,000 Gazans have been reported dead since the Israeli siege and bombing campaign began last October, including over 16,000 children. But this number is likely to be a huge underestimate, as it does not include those whom health services have been unable to reach. Leading medical journal, the Lancet, estimated the real death toll resulting from the war to be closer to 186,000, over 8% of the pre-October Gazan population. 

And this should come as no surprise, as Israeli officials have openly announced their genocidal intent since the start of their bombardment:

• On October 10th IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari declared that “We are dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. The focus is on destruction, not accuracy.”
• On October 9th, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” 

The war’s conduct has been characterised by two things: 

• The use of what US President Biden, the leading military supplier of the genocide, has called “indiscriminate bombing” of civilian and residential areas, including refugee camps and UN schools.
  • In the past week alone, Israeli bombing has targeted eight schools which were sheltering hundreds of desperate refugees.
  • Since October, over 70% of UN-run schools in Gaza have been bombed; 95% of them were being used as refugee shelters at the time.
  • All seven of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, many of them mined and obliterated whilst empty rather than destroyed during battles.
• The systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure and the means of sustaining life.
  • Water and sanitation facilities have been deliberately targeted, with 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants in Gaza destroyed by the end of June 2024, according to a recent Oxfam report. The water supply to Northern Gaza has been turned off since October 2023.
  • Aid convoys have been repeatedly blocked or targeted.
  • The Israeli military has been “systematically dismantling Gaza’s healthcare system, conducting more than 460 attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel. Every single hospital in Gaza has been affected, and no hospital remains fully functioning in Gaza. Nineteen hospitals are currently completely out of service, and the healthcare system is now close to collapse,” according to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Recent weeks have seen a surge in attacks on healthcare facilities, according to the WHO. 
  • A recent Human Rights Watch report concluded that “Israeli authorities have cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gaza’s population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and critical humanitarian aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation as a method of warfare.” 

The result has been the deliberate and calculated creation of a humanitarian catastrophe across Gaza, with famine now believed to have spread “across all of Gaza,” according to an independent panel of UN experts. Infectious diseases are on the rise and MSF have reported that rates of diarrhoea are 25 times higher than pre-war levels, whilst poliovirus has now been detected in Gaza’s sewage, threatening a new health disaster. Overwhelming testimony suggests that torture is endemic for Palestinians in Israeli military prisons, into which thousands of Palestinians have been thrown since last October. 

The Labour party leadership have consistently supported these atrocities: 

• Asked about whether Israel had the right to cut off water and electricity to Gaza, Kier Starmer replied “I think Israel does have that right.”
• David Lammy, as shadow foreign secretary, described the 8th June Nuseriat massacre, which killed almost 300 Palestinians, including children shot dead at point blank range, as a “glimmer of hope.”
• Lammy’s recent calls for a ceasefire linked to hostage release is actually a thinly-veiled demand for a continuation of the slaughter. By making a ceasefire conditional on the release of hostages, Lammy is de facto condoning Israel’s collective punishment of the Gazan population for the continued detention of Israeli citizens by Hamas. And his refusal to put any conditions whatsoever on continued British military support for Israel’s slaughter, make his calls for an end to settler violence and the blocking of aid hollow and meaningless.
• The restoration of funding to UNRWA, welcome though it is, is also deeply hypocritical given that Britain is so deeply culpable for the ongoing slaughter that UNRWA is trying desperately to relieve. 

We, the undersigned, call on Oxford East MP and Minister for Development and Equalities Anneliese Dodds to publicly oppose Britain’s military participation in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and to publicly demand that her government: 

• Scrap the UK’s military cooperation agreement with Israel.
• Pull the RAF out of Gaza
• End Britain’s training of Israeli soldiers
• End British military cargo drops to Tel Aviv
• End the use of RAF Akrotiri for transferring military supplies for use in occupied Palestine