Foreign Office says review found ‘clear risk’ UK arms may be used in violation of humanitarian law

The UK has broken with the Biden administration on a significant part of their tightly coordinated policy towards Israel by announcing it is suspending some arms export licences to Israel because of a “clear risk” they may be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

The Foreign Office said a two-month internal review had raised concerns about the way Israel had conducted itself in the conflict in Gaza and that the decision specifically related to concerns around the treatment of Palestinian detainees and the supply of aid to Gaza.

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said it applied to 30 of the 350 existing arms licences, but would almost entirely exclude all UK components for the F-35 fighter jet programme, seen as a significant loophole by pro-Palestinian groups.

Lammy, aware of the sensitivity of the issue in Israel and the US, stressed his decision was taken more in sorrow than anger, adding the conclusion did not amount to a full arms embargo, and did not even go as far as the suspension of licences made by Margaret Thatcher in 1982.

  • @filister
    8•12 days ago

    You know if this was Russia, the West would have reacted a lot faster, but since it is good old Israel, they simply ignored their blatant human rights violations. And this bothers me a lot. Why does the West have double standards when it comes to condemnation of obvious war crimes?

    And it is really crushing to realise that everything is politics, even human suffering. Everything is first evaluated if it can be exploited for their own gain.

    The US applauded when the ICC prescribed Putin as a war criminal but at the same time thought of applying sanctions on the ICC prosecutors who were planning to prescribe Netanyahu and Gallant as war criminals. The same US which by the way refuses to be a signatory of the ICC, because they don’t want their own military to be persecuted for human rights violations. And that’s sickening. Like didn’t we learn anything from history? Why repeating the same mistakes over and over again?