THE UK Government has been urged to “come clean” on a military supply flight it dispatched to Israel.
An RAF flight, numbered RRR9943, took off from the Akrotiri base in Cyprus on Wednesday evening bound for Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
The Airbus A400M, a military cargo plane with a 37 tonne payload, landed back at the Mediterranean base that evening just after 8pm, according to information from the Flight Radar tracking site.
The flight was first flagged by independent journalist Matt Kennard and confirmed by The National.
The UK Government has so far refused to confirm why the plane was dispatched.
Scottish Greens MSP Ross Greer (above) said ministers must “lay out the exact military support Labour is providing to Israel”.
He said: “Just two days before this flight Israel’s Prime Minister, already wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, announced his plans to ethnically cleanse 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza.
“There can be no excuse for aiding and abetting this genocidal Israeli government. Keir Starmer must come clean and lay out the exact military support Labour is providing to Israel.
“As a former human rights lawyer though, he knows that this would likely just confirm the British government’s complicity in crimes against humanity.”
The UK Government is thought to have provided assistance to Israel through its Cyprus military base throughout Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which the UK medical journal The Lancet has estimated to have killed between 55,298–78,525 people.
Israel’s assault on Gaza left the territory a wasteland and Donald Trump (below) has said he wants to ethnically cleanse the land for redevelopment into the “riviera of the Middle East”.
The UK Government has repeatedly refused to be drawn on the precise nature of the RAF’s military assistance to Israel.
However, it has been revealed that RAF Akrotiri has been used to send US special forces flights to the Middle Eastern country.
The number of these flights reached an average of one per week between June and October last year, according to an investigation by Declassified UK.
Britain’s involvement with what international judges have said is plausibly a genocide in Gaza “goes far beyond” what is commonly assumed, researchers warned last year.
RAF Akrotiri has allowed US military cargo to reach Israel, according to research by the British Palestine Committee, even though Labour banned most arms sales to the country.
The UK Government allowed a notable carve out for F-35 fighter jet parts, which have facilitated the construction of bomber planes to strike the Palestinian territory.
The Ministry of Defence did not respond to a request for comment.
