Dear friend,
As the UK war machine continues to fuel Israel’s Gaza genocide, people around the world face the devastating, lethal impacts of the arms trade.
Israel has escalated its starvation of Gaza, facilitated by international weapons corporations and the governments that approve their exports, arming occupying forces who murder Palestinians at aid distribution centres. The hard work of people up and down the country opposing these horrific atrocities, and the UK arms exports which fuel them, has not gone without an impact. In response to mass calls from the public for an arms embargo on Israel and with the support of CAAT, this week 56 MPs and
Lords have written to the Foreign Secretary and Business Secretary calling for an arms embargo on Israel, as well as transparency around export controls.
In May, CAAT released ground-breaking figures around the massive increase of UK arms exports to Israel in 2024. Our research shows that in 2024, the overwhelming majority of individual licences for military equipment to
Israel, totalling £127.6 million, were issued between October and December 2024, after the government’s partial arms suspension in September 2024. This figure is higher than the total value of licences granted between 2020 and 2023 combined.
Building upon this research, alongside the 56 MPs and Lords, we ask:
- Why is the UK continuing to send this military equipment to a state which the government has acknowledged is not committed to complying with international Humanitarian Law?
- Why did this value of licences increase so drastically following the September 2024 arms suspension?
- What message does this surge in licences send to Israel, a state for which the UK’s own Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU) found that “it is uncontentious that conduct which could, in principle, satisfy the physical component of genocide continues to take place in Gaza”.
The government would not feel pressure to answer these urgent questions without all of us coming together to challenge the information they are sharing with us about UK arms exports.
Politicians have not only refrained from answering these key questions, but also continue to lie to the media and public. This week Foreign Secretary David Lammy claimed that the UK is not sending any military
equipment to Israel that might be used in Gaza, and he also denied that the UK is providing Israel with spare parts to the F-35 fighter jets. The government’s well-documented F-35 exemption in its partial arms suspension has been defended by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) in the High Court against Palestinian Human Rights organisation Al-Haq, who brought forward the legal challenge. CAAT has and will continue to denounce the government’s fraudulent assertions denying its military exports to Israel.
CAAT could not do this work without your support, and as always we thank you for your determined efforts - whether you can join us in the streets, share our posts on social media, amplify our petitions, organise events with CAAT, lobby your MP and council or protest at arms companies directly. Your donations, if you are in a financial position to be able to consider this, are hugely appreciated as well.
Please support CAAT in our continuing work to STOP the arms trade by making a donation to Keep CAAT Campaigning. | 
