UK still supplying IDF despite official embargo – report

Pro-Palestinian groups used Israeli tax authority import data for their analysis.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The UK is continuing to supply the IDF with thousands of military items despite an official embargo on offensive weaponry, pro-Palestinian groups charged in a newly released report.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, Progressive International, and Workers for a Free Palestine said they analyzed import data from the Israeli tax authority in the period of September 2024 to March 2025 to see if the cancellation of 29 arms licenses in the fall had indeed limited arms sales to those defensive in nature, as the British government had promised.

A stated exception was for parts for the F-35 stealth fighter, whose production and maintenance is a cooperative venture of many countries besides its primary manufacturer in the United States, and national security demanded that its supply chain not be affected.

Two hundred other arms licenses had been left in place that were supposedly unconnected to weapons used in Israel’s war in Gaza, which was making Whitehall uncomfortable due to contested charges that the IDF was violating international humanitarian law in its fight against the Hamas terror organization.

The report found that since September, 8,630 items were exported under the category “bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and similar munitions of war and parts thereof – other.”

Another 146 “tanks and other armored fighting vehicles” and parts for them were shipped to Israel in four other consignments, according to the report, adding that the value of all these imported items stood at just over £500,000.

Anti-Israel legislators jumped on the report to slam Whitehall.

Former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell said that Foreign Secretary David Lammy should resign if he deliberately misled Parliament in characterizing the remaining arms sales as defensive items.

Zarah Sultana, who has often accused Israel of committing mass murder during the ongoing war, inflating even the unproven casualty counts reported by the Palestinian terrorists, charged her own Labour party’s government with “lying to us about the arms it is supplying to Israel while it wages genocide in Gaza.”

On the first anniversary last year of the Hamas invasion that sparked the ongoing war, she demanded a ban on all arms sales to Israel, which Prime Minister Keir Starmer flatly rejected.

“None for defensive purposes on the anniversary of October 7 and days after a huge attack by Iran into Israel would be a wrong position for this government, and I will not take it,” Starmer said.

That same month, dozens of lawmakers, including 21 from Labour, backed a call to end all military exports to the Jewish state.

The UK Foreign Ministry rejected the premise of the report, stating, “This government has suspended relevant licences for the IDF that might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.”

“Of the remaining licences for Israel,” it continued, “the vast majority are not for the Israeli Defence Forces but are for civilian purposes or re-export, and therefore are not used in the war in Gaza.

“The only exemption is the F-35 programme due to its strategic role in Nato and wider implications for international peace and security. Any suggestion that the UK is licensing other weapons for use by Israel in the war in Gaza is misleading.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply criticized the announcement of the partial embargo in September, saying it was unjustified as Israel was “taking unprecedented measures to keep civilians out of harm’s way and comporting fully with international law.”

He also reminded London of the war crime Hamas was committing in still holding 100 of the 251 hostages who were kidnapped during the invasion, five of whom had British citizenship.

arms embargoDavid LammyIsrael-Hamas warPro-Palestinian activistsUnited Kingdom