Declassified UK

Posted: 31st March 2024

March 2024

Hi all,

We’re now into the sixth month of the Gaza genocide, and it’s difficult to know what to write here.

Over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed. More than 13,000 of them are children. Seventy percent of Gaza’s residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the entire population has been forcibly displaced.

71,000 Palestinians have been injured. Around 10 children have a limb amputated every day, often without anaesthetic. Those who have survived the bombs are now starving. Those who survive starvation will almost certainly be traumatised for the rest of their lives.

These statistics are horrific. Yet numbers alone mask the true extent of what is being unleashed on Gaza, with US and British support.

How is it possible to quantify the torture inflicted on the Palestinian man, 25 years old, whose three-month-old baby was decimated by an Israeli missile – alongside his wife, parents, and family – after spending years saving for IVF treatment?

How about the 8-year-old girl who lost her mother and all of her siblings in an Israeli airstrike, and was trapped next to them under the rubble for a full 12 hours before being rescued?

Health workers returning from Gaza report that the horrors are indescribable – incalculably worse than what we’re seeing reported in the media. Israel has turned Gaza into hell on earth.

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Israel

This month, we’ve repeatedly shown how the UK government, which bears massive historical responsibility for the present-day situation of the Palestinians, has been working hard to conceal its complicity in the Gaza genocide.

After revealing that Israeli military planes have been landing in Britain since 7 October, Declassified’s chief investigator Matt Kennard showed that the UK government is refusing to say if Israeli bomber planes have been using Britain’s base on Cyprus, following reports that Israel’s F-35s have access to RAF Akrotiri. It could not get more serious than this: Israel is potentially using a British colonial outpost to facilitate war crime after war crime in Gaza, and the British public are not allowed to know about it.

In another disturbing case, I publisheda detailed profile of Mitchell, noting how he has consistently defended and apologised for Israel’s war on Gaza.

And what is Labour party leader Keir Starmer’s role in all of this? I askedthe Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for Starmer’s emails from when, as Director of Public Prosecutions, he blocked the arrest of former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni over alleged war crimes. The CPS sent back a number of heavily redacted files, raising serious questions about Starmer’s part in shielding an Israeli official from prosecution under universal jurisdiction legislation. It is precisely this kind of immunity that has emboldened Israeli officials to carry out further war crimes in recent months.

Media Complicity

This month, we also published a series of articles about the British media’s complicity in Israeli atrocities.

Veteran media critic and journalist Jonathan Cook dismantled the corporate media’s coverage of the Gaza genocide, examining how Western journalists are playing the role of propagandists rather than reporters.

Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University, also took the British media to task. He found that, since 1 February, there has not been a single mention of “genocide” in the Twitter feeds of BBC News, BBC World or Channel 4 News. What does this say about our broadcast media?

British-Palestinian author Hamza Ali Shah broke down a recent report which revealed Britain’s worst kept secret: the systematic bias of the mainstream media in favour of Israel when it comes to reporting on its onslaught in Gaza.

The statistics in the report are shocking, if unsurprising: 76% of online articles frame Israel’s genocide as the “Israel-Hamas war”; the terms slaughter and massacre are mostly used to describe attacks on Israelis; and Israeli perspectives are referenced three times more than Palestinian ones.

It’s not just on the issue of Gaza, however, that the British media exhibits such shameless servility to power. Mark did a statistical analysis of the Guardian’s reporting on GCHQ, finding that most of the stories can be considered sycophantic towards the intelligence agency. In some cases, the Guardian even appears to function as a recruitment agency for GCHQ.

Protesting Israel

This month, the UK government intensified its efforts to suppress pro-Palestine – or, better put, anti-genocide – protests. But who is actually advising the UK government on how to respond to the most significant outbreak of foreign policy-related activism in recent decades?

I showed how John Woodcock, the UK government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, has worked with and accepted funding from the Israel lobby – even amid the Gaza genocide. This raises serious questions about Woodcock’s suitability to advise the government on issues relating to Palestine, or extremism altogether.

In the face of these threats, direct action groups like Palestine Action are defiant. Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, detailed how the organisation has forced four UK companies to cut ties with Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems in the past three months – and has no plan on stopping.

While events in the Middle East are contributing to a crackdown of civil liberties in Britain, Declassified has also been covering how Israel’s war on Gaza is escalating towards what could become a major regional conflict involving Britain.

I detailed how a range of British political media figures are now openly calling for confrontation with Iran. Declassified’s chief reporter, Phil Miller, revealed that Rishi Sunak’s bombing campaign against Yemen, designed to shield Israel from the consequences of its genocide, has already cost the British public up to a staggering £19m. 

British Operations

We’ve also been reporting critically on British operations outside of the Middle East.

Phil showed how RAF helicopters flew more than 100 missions into Niger and Burkina Faso ahead of military coups across west Africa. The revelation came after Niger’s junta expelled US forces, with thousands of French troops being kicked out of the country last year.

Journalist Mohamed Elmaazi trawled through the UK archives, and founda top secret file showing how the Foreign Office conducted a covert propaganda campaign to help remove Ghana’s president Kwama Nkrumah in 1966.

Journalist and campaigner Anne Cadwallader wrote two detailed pieces about the UK government’s sordid role in Ireland. She analysed how Britain’s new legacy law closes down legal redress for all victims of the Troubles, and delved into the activities of “Stakeknife” – the British spy in Ireland who got away with murder.

Julian Assange

It will soon be five years since the Metropolitan Police dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and put him in Belmarsh maximum security prison – and Assange’s options for appeal against extradition to the US may soon be up.

This month, the High Court in London ruled that Assange may be extradited if the US government can provide certain assurances within three weeks. The assurances include that he will not be prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality and that he will not receive the death penalty.

Assange will still have recourse to the European Court of Human Rights – assuming the UK government doesn’t remove him from its jurisdiction while the application is being processed.

Matt spoke with Babar Ahmad, who was extradited from Britain to the US in 2012, and published an extensive article about what awaits Assange if he loses his appeals. The reality, Matt found, is terrifying beyond words.

Interview Series

We’re also stepping up production of video content on our YouTube channel, which you can subscribe to Mark about the Israeli troops being trained in Britain, Hudaabout Palestine Action’s recent campaign victories, Jonathan about the British media’s pro-Israel bias, and myself about Starmer’s shadowy record as DPP.

As you can see, it’s been another incredibly busy month, and we’re working hard with limited resources to push back against a corrupt political and media system.

We need support from the public to carry out this task – so if you’re in a position to do so, please contribute as little as £3 a month or £30 a year by clicking here.

All the best,

John

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