Corbyn Presents Inquiry Bill as UK Spy Planes Continue Flights Over Gaza

Date: 21 May 2025 - 22:05

News ID: ۱۳۹۸۰۷

LONDON (Dispatches) – The British government is facing fresh questions about its Royal Air Force (RAF) surveillance flights over Gaza - which have continued even as Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced that the UK was suspending free trade agreement talks with the Zionist regime.
Lammy made the announcement in parliament on Tuesday in response to the occupying regime’s expanded war in Gaza.
The foreign secretary said the UK was imposing sanctions on key Israeli settler leaders and organizations, and his Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, took the highly unusual step of summoning the Zionist regime’s ambassador.
This was a landmark moment, symbolically deeply significant, and it is sure to damage relations between Britain and the occupying regime.
But it has done nothing to stop parliamentarians asking questions.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was set to table legislation in parliament on Wednesday for an independent public inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Zionist regime’s aggression in Gaza.
The independent MP first called for an inquiry in March, with the backing of 40 other MPs.
Corbyn’s bill requires the inquiry to consider aspects of the UK’s relations with the Zionist regime that Lammy did not mention in his remarks on Tuesday: “The sale, supply or use of weapons, surveillance aircraft and Royal Air Force bases.”
For months, British politicians have questioned the government about the role of a Royal Air Force base on the island of Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, just a 40-minute flight from Tel Aviv.
From there, RAF shadow aircraft have conducted hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza throughout the Zionist regime’s war on the besieged enclave.
In response to questions about these flights, the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) has repeatedly insisted they are in support of “captive rescue”.
Just last Tuesday, at a clandestine party for Israel’s Independence Day organized by the Zionist regime’s embassy at the British Museum, Defense Minister Maria Eagle boasted about “the RAF conducting surveillance flights over the Eastern Mediterranean in support of captive rescue efforts”.
A source with knowledge of British surveillance capabilities in the Middle East told MEE that the surveillance flights give Britain “a bird’s-eye view of the genocide”.
The source noted that the UK, a partner in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that also includes the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, is the “number one gatherer of intelligence” in the Middle East.