UK closes government unit tracking Israel's potential international law breaches
The British Foreign Office has closed its unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza.
This comes after Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said on 9 April during her annual foreign policy speech that supporting international law would be a linchpin of the Foreign Office's agenda under her leadership.
The decision, made because of cuts in the department, means funding for the Conflict and Security Monitoring Project run by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) will end.
The centre has run the world's largest open-source monitoring of incidents across Israel, occupied Palestine and Lebanon.
The Guardian reported on Thursday that officials have been warned the project's closure means the Foreign Office will lose access to a database of 26,000 verified incidents in the Middle East.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said on Friday: "We continue to heavily invest expertise and resource into our conflict prevention and resolution work, including the monitoring of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
"As part of an internal restructure, the work of the cell continues from within a different team in the [Foreign Office]."
The spokesperson said the ministry continues to retain access to all Foreign Office-funded "research conducted by CIR", and that "these reports are only one of the many ways we inform our assessments and approach to [international humanitarian law] issues".
The CIR has conducted more than 20 investigations, including into Israeli forces shooting children in Gaza.
'Obscure unimaginable violations'
The unit's closure follows the Labour government's decision to cut the overseas aid budget to 0.3 percent of gross national income.
The Foreign Office review that led to the closure was ordered by Oliver Robbins, the department's permanent secretary who Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week dismissed over the Peter Mandelson scandal.
Yasmine Ahmed, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, said the closure "makes me question the extent to which this government is complying with its obligations under the arms export criteria and its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, as well as obligations that it’s meant to be discharging under the Genocide Convention".
Katie Fallon, the advocacy manager at Campaign Against Arms Trade, said the closure will protect ministers and officials “who know that they have been manipulating the data on potential violations of [international humanitarian law], beyond any logical interpretation, to obscure unimaginable violations and crimes committed against the most vulnerable people in conflict and sustain arms sales at any cost”.
Britain cooperated militarily with Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza, most significantly by sharing intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza with the Israeli military.
The UK signed a military agreement with Israel in 2020 that resolved to "formalise and enhance the defence partnership and support the growing Israel-UK partnership".
The accord itself has not been made public, but former Conservative defence minister James Heappey said in May 2021 that it "will streamline and provide a mechanism for planning our joint activity".
In 2024, Luke Pollard, a Labour minister of state in the defence ministry, said that "it is not possible to release this agreement as it is held at a higher classification", and the Ministry of Defence said last October that the accord was still in place, according to Declassified UK.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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