Declassified files show Britain has long known of Israel’s criminality against Palestinians, as Whitehall has deepened its military, trade and diplomatic support.
The parallels are remarkable.
There were “numerous reports that the Israeli authorities have prevented medical and other humanitarian assistance from reaching those in need”.
The Red Cross was saying “that their staff have been threatened at gunpoint, warning shots have been fired at their vehicles and two ICRC [Red Cross] vehicles have been damaged by tanks”.
There were “media reports of people dying for lack of treatment” and on the “humanitarian impact of curfews affecting over 1 million people”.
There were Israeli soldiers indulging in “theft and looting from homes and shops and the vandalism of people’s homes”.
And “many reports of the killing of unarmed Palestinians”.
Sound familiar?
But this is not Gaza in 2025. It was the occupied West Bank in 2002, described in an internal Foreign Office report revealed in the British archives.
‘Defensive shield’
Then as now, Israel claimed to be acting “defensively”.
In April 2002, it launched “Operation Defensive Shield”, a large-scale military intervention in the major cities and surrounding areas of the West Bank.
Ordered by then prime minister Ariel Sharon in response to numerous suicide bombings against Israelis by Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, the Israeli military killed nearly 500 Palestinians within a month.
An official in the Foreign Office’s Middle East Peace Process Section wrote that the intervention in the West Bank involved a “pattern” of “human rights abuses” by the Israeli military.
Some British officials protested at the nature of those Israeli military operations. Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, privately told Sharon’s foreign policy adviser, Danny Ayalon, that he was “appalled at the military assault on the Palestinian areas”.
“The IDF’s behaviour was worthy more of the Russian army than that of a supposedly civilised country”, he told him. “There was no doubt that individual soldiers were out of control, and committing acts which were outraging international opinion”.
Lord Michael Levy, prime minister Tony Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East, was just as blunt. He told Israeli defence minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer in another private meeting that “There was no military solution to this kind of problem. We condemned terror from either side, Palestinian or the IDF”.
Ben-Eliezer responded by repeating that Israel sought to “destroy all terrorist infrastructure”.
Indeed, as in Gaza today, the onslaught in 2002 was supposedly meant to end terrorism against Israel.
Two weeks before major operations began, Ayalon told Cowper-Coles that “the plan was to mount long-term, large-scale military operations in the Territories, which would dismantle once and for all the terrorist infrastructures there”.
‘Routine excessive force’
The files, released last year, contain an extraordinary report by an unnamed senior British army officer, who wrote that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were a “second rate, ill disciplined, swaggering and bullying force”.
“They routinely use excessive force such as firing at the ‘legs’ of stone throwers or at ‘car tyres’ with the inevitable stream of ambulances ferrying youths to hospital with fatal bullet wounds to the head and body”, he wrote.
The officer added, in another echo of the present: “The only area where individuals have been held accountable is where IDF actions have resulted in deaths of their own as opposed to the deaths of Palestinians”.
He believed the IDF “look down on the Arabs and despise them… It needs to be said that the average Israeli does not value an Arab life as equal to a Jewish one.”
Then as now, Israeli actions involved war crimes. The files contain a report from Oxfam lamenting that in April 2002 the Israeli military used its tanks and bulldozers to cut the main water supply pipelines at 24 different places in Ramallah and other towns in the West Bank.
When Israel cut off water supplies in Gaza in October 2023 Keir Starmer notoriously supported it. When asked on LBC, he said Israel had the “right” to do that.
Indeed, Oxfam’s 2002 report could virtually have been written at any time during Israel’s latest onslaught against Gaza.
It noted “grave breaches of humanitarian law, including the targeting of medical personnel, denial of medical care to the injured and chronically ill, actual and threatened violence against clearly-identified staff of the ICRC, Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the UN, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure for water and electricity, and a basic lack of respect for civilian life and welfare”.
20 years of support
What has the UK been doing in the 23 years since officials were privately horrified by Israeli war crimes during Operation Defensive Shield?
The answer is that it has been deepening relations with Israel across the board.
In April 2002, the UK was supplying less than £1m a year in arms to Israel, the files state. Even since 2008, the UK has exported no less than £590m worth of military equipment to Israel.
At times, during other episodes in Israel’s criminality, Britain has temporarily halted some arms exports, as it has today. But then they always resume, supplying the same army known to have committed war crimes.
Then there’s the military training and exercises, across all branches of the UK and Israeli services, ongoing over the decades, again benefitting the forces promoting “terror” against Palestinians.
There’s the secret military agreement the UK signed with Israel in December 2020 and the strategic ‘Roadmap’ accord agreed between Britain and Israel in 2023.
Not to mention the 2022 “strategic approach” to securing a new trade agreement and a host of further financial and diplomatic backing emanating from Whitehall, in Westminster and at the UN and globally.
Over the past 20 years, Britain has been one of the leading world forces aiding Israel, helping to prevent international action against it as the brutal occupation and illegal settling of Palestine have intensified.
Promoting terrorism
All this has been done in the knowledge that Israel’s repressive policies and “routine excessive force” have inspired the terrorism that Israel says it is fighting. The 2002 files are explicit on this point.
Levy told Ben-Eliezer in April 2002, referring to Israel’s military activities, that “all it would do was produce more suicide bombers”.
Indeed, Levy wrote to Blair and foreign secretary Jack Straw on 1 April 2002 stating: “Dreadful suicide bombs almost daily and motivation only increased by current IDF operations”.
He added: “My experience in the region is that it is just not possible to keep 3½ million Palestinians under formal occupation against their will. If a 16 year old girl is prepared to join the ranks of suicide bombers something is fundamentally wrong”.
But still helping Israel
Yet these officials, while coldly recognising the reality of Israel’s actions, still couldn’t bring themselves to make Britain seriously challenge it.
The write–up of Levy’s meeting with Ben-Eliezer states: “Lord Levy ended the meeting by underlining our wish to help Israel get out of the mess into which it has got itself by launching the campaign into Palestinian areas.”
On 9 April, Blair’s private secretary Matthew Rycroft suggested that his boss “reaffirm my own commitment to Israel” in being awarded an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.
Neither could those officials bring themselves to unequivocally recognise Palestine as a state.
The 2002 files contain a ten-page report by the Cabinet Office called “Making a Palestinian State”. Twenty three years on, the conditions for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state are far worse, with hundreds of thousands of illegal Israeli settlers now living in the West Bank.
British officials knew then of Israel’s effective opposition to a Palestinian state. David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote on 2 April that Sharon’s government offered only “some extremely vague idea of a Palestinian state that might at some point acquire the attributes of true statehood, but only when it suited Israel”.
Two years later, Blair even considered establishing a “privileged Israeli partnership” with Nato and the European Union in the event of a peace deal with the Palestinians, the British files also show.
There were no red lines, there are no red lines. British ministers, in both 2002 and in 2025, remain knee-deep in aiding and abetting what they know is Israel’s brutal criminality.