The British Foreign Office has closed its unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza.
\nThis comes after Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said on April 9 during her annual foreign policy speech that supporting international law would be a linchpin of the Foreign Office’s agenda under her leadership.
\nThe decision, made due to departmental cuts, means funding for the Conflict and Security Monitoring Project run by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) will end.
\nThe centre has run the world’s largest open-source monitoring of incidents across Israel, occupied Palestine, and Lebanon.
\nThe 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.
\nNew MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
\nSign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
\nA Foreign Office spokesperson said on Friday: “We continue to heavily invest expertise and resources 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].”
\nThe 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.”
\nThe CIR has conducted more than 20 investigations, including into Israeli forces shooting children in Gaza.
\n‘Obscure unimaginable violations’
\nThe unit’s closure follows the Labour government’s decision to cut the overseas aid budget to 0.3 percent of gross national income.
\nThe Foreign Office review that led to the closure was ordered by Oliver Robbins, the department’s permanent secretary whom Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week dismissed over the Peter Mandelson scandal.
\nRead More \u00bb
\nYasmine 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\u2019s meant to be discharging under the Genocide Convention.”
\nKatie Fallon, the advocacy manager at Campaign Against Arms Trade, said the closure will protect ministers and officials \u201cwho 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.\u201d
\nBritain cooperated militarily with Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza, most significantly by sharing intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza with the Israeli military.
\nThe 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.”
\nThe 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.”
\nIn 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.
\nMiddle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
\n#UKForeignOffice #InternationalLaw #Gaza #HumanRights #IsraelPalestine #ArmsTrade #ForeignPolicy #ConflictMonitoring #GenocideConvention #UKPolitics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 April 9 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 due […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}