The British government withheld key evidence from the High Court in a major legal challenge to its arms exports to Israel, evidence that would have included details supporting AOAV’s own investigation into hundreds of UK spy flights over Gaza. This omission, AOAV believes, raises concerns over transparency, accountability, and Britain’s potential complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.
On 30 June 2025, the High Court ruled that the UK’s continued export of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel was lawful. The judgment followed a legal challenge brought by the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, with the support of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam.
The claimants argued that the UK was breaching its international obligations by allowing the export of components used in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, many of which have resulted in mass civilian casualties.
While the judges accepted that Israel’s military conduct could “in principle” meet the physical component of genocide, they concluded that the question of genocidal intent was too politically sensitive for the court to determine. The ruling, however, has drawn criticism not only for its legal reasoning, but for what it failed to consider.
Most notably, the court was not presented with the details that would have been at the heart of AOAV’s investigation into the UK’s intelligence-gathering role in the conflict. In a report published in March 2025, AOAV (in conjunction with Declassified) revealed that the Royal Air Force had conducted at least 519 surveillance flights over or near Gaza since December 2023. These missions, flown by Shadow R1 aircraft of 14 Squadron from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, coincided with numerous Israeli military operations in which civilians were killed, including the Nuseirat refugee camp assault that left 274 Palestinians dead, though it is unknown if the RAF’s spy data had any role in such attacks.
This is because details about the flights have been shrouded in secrecy. Despite repeated parliamentary questions, the Ministry of Defence has refused to disclose how the flight spy footage is stored, whether it is shared with Israel, or if any of it has been deleted. The official position remains that the flights are conducted solely to assist in hostage recovery. Yet, the timing and intensity of the sorties suggest a far broader intelligence role: one that could implicate the UK in facilitating targeting operations that breach international law.
The Foreign Office, for its part, has admitted it has not requested the surveillance footage. Stephen Lillie, the department’s director for defence and international security, told a parliamentary committee in December 2024: “To the best of my knowledge, we have not asked for that information from RAF flights.” That admission came despite the fact that the Foreign Office’s own International Humanitarian Law Compliance Assessment (IHLCAP) team is charged with reviewing whether Israel is adhering to the laws of war, a process that forms the legal basis for allowing arms exports to continue.
Instead of relying on this potentially decisive body of UK-gathered intelligence, Declassified has reported that the Foreign Office reportedly commissioned a third-party group, the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), to collect, collate, and verify open source data related to the conflict. It has been reported that CIR was paid £715,000 for its work in 2024 alone. Its analysis, which was reportedly submitted to the court as evidence of Israel’s purported legal compliance, concluded that only one of over 400 incidents it reviewed could be a “possible” breach of international law. This was a strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. The other 412 incidents were deemed “inconclusive.”
CIR presents itself as an independent organisation. However, Declassified has reported that its co-founders, Ross Burley and Adam Rutland, both have long-standing ties to the Foreign Office. Burley served as the UK embassy’s press officer in Tel Aviv and went on to lead the government’s counter-disinformation programmes. Rutland spent 14 years in the diplomatic service. CIR is also funded by the UK, US and Australian governments. There is no accusation of wrong-doing on the part of Burley or Rutland.
One of CIR’s key reports, examining Israeli military shootings of minors, was explicitly requested during the court case but was withheld. The UK government has refused to explain why the report was not disclosed and will not publish it.
In doing so, it may have breached its legal duty of candour to the court.
The decision seemingly to ignore both AOAV’s findings and detail the truth of the spy planes’ data, suppress a potentially damning CIR report, and present only select evidence to the judiciary if true would reflect a broader pattern of secrecy in Britain’s approach to its military and intelligence ties with Israel.
During a hearing earlier this year, one government lawyer argued that “this is not our war” and claimed that Britain could not assess whether war crimes were occurring without access to Israeli intelligence, despite the UK’s own military having compiled thousands of hours of surveillance footage.
GLAN has criticised the Foreign Office’s methodology as structurally flawed. By focusing on isolated incidents rather than patterns of behaviour, such as repeated strikes on hospitals, forced population transfers and the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure, the government is able to avoid drawing damning conclusions.
This selective approach insulates UK ministers from having to act, and allows arms transfers to continue unchecked.
The government’s refusal to engage with AOAV’s report reflects, we believe, wilful blindness. By failing to review, let alone disclose, UK spy plane intelligence that might implicate an ally in war crimes, the government has prioritised political expediency over legal and moral responsibility.
As AOAV has previously warned, when intelligence is gathered and potentially shared without oversight, and when arms are exported without scrutiny, the consequences are not theoretical. They are measured both in lives lost and in the erosion of the very laws Britain claims to uphold.
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