A WELSH Labour MP has called on the UK Government to suspend all arms sales to Israel to ensure that the UK is not “complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza”.
Steve Witherden, MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, held a Parliamentary debate on British arms sales to Israel on Monday evening, calling on the UK Government to suspend all arms exports.
During the debate, Witherden described Gaza as a “slaughterhouse” and said that the UK Government is still letting the “weapons flow” into Israel despite the country's genocidal acts on Gaza.
Witherden also highlighted the lack of transparency surrounding the true extent of UK military exports to Israel, particularly regarding the supply of components for the F-35 fighter jet programme, and urged ministers to outline the specific conditions that would trigger a halt to further exports.
“The Government have claimed that there are red lines that would trigger a halt to exports, but Gaza is already a slaughterhouse,” Witherden said.
“Children are emaciated or dying of hunger, hospitals have been intentionally destroyed and Israel’s leaders vow to wipe out Gaza, and still the weapons flow, so finally, Minister, where is our red line?”
The Labour MP added: “I call on this Government to suspend all arms exports to Israel, to ensure that no British-made weapons are used in Israel’s brutal plans to annex, starve and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.
“The credibility of this House depends not just on what we condemn, but on what we enable, and history will remember that we enabled too much.”
Witherden has called on the UK Government to publish an exact list of export licences still in effect and has asked why it has not suspended F-35 component shipments after admitting a “clear risk” of violations of international law.
The debate comes after the UK Government said it would suspend negotiations with the Israeli government on a new free trade deal last month.
The Foreign Secretary David Lammy described Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government as “extremists” at the time, but it was revealed that the UK Government sent a spy plane to surveil Gaza just hours later after his statement.
In September last year, Lammy announced the suspension of around 30 arms sale licences to Israel amid concerns that a “clear risk” exists that they could be used to breach international humanitarian law.
The UK Government said exports to the global F-35 programme would be excluded from the suspension decision to avoid “prejudicing the entire” global supply pool – despite media confirmation that the jets had been used by Israel to bomb the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone in Gaza in July 2024.
In May, figures published by the UK Government showed that Labour licensed the export of more military equipment to Israel in the final three months of 2024 than the Tories had for all of 2020-2023 combined.
Challenged on those figures in the Commons, Lammy suggested the story was “clickbait”.
