British diplomats condemned Israeli conduct in the occupied West Bank as a pattern of human rights abuses in 2002 – 24 years before London took a tougher stance towards Israel this week.
These decades-old condemnations are contained in UK Foreign Office files written during the administration of former Prime Minister Tony Blair while Israel undertook a brutal 2002 offensive in the occupied West Bank.
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The files, released in 2024 and reported in a recent investigation by the website Declassified UK, record British diplomats describing a pattern of abuses by a state their own government would go on to arm for the next two decades.
Today, Blair sits on the Board of Peace that presides over Gaza, where Israel’s disregard for Palestinian lives and the rules of war has been demonstrated on a genocidal scale, while the UK’s newly seated leadership refer to Israel’s actions as “a stain on the conscience of the world”.
But what did the British government already know about Israel’s actions more than 20 years ago?
What the files say
That record begins in March 2002, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield in retaliation for a wave of attacks by Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas.
Israeli forces tore through the occupied West Bank, killing 500 Palestinians in a single month, mostly civilians, and injuring another 1,500.
British officials were deeply aware of the scale of violations committed by Israeli forces.
A Foreign Office official wrote at the time that Israeli military operations in the West Bank involved a “pattern” of “human rights abuses”.
A senior British army officer was more blunt, calling the Israeli military 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,” wrote the officer who was unnamed in the files.
Those concerns were put to the Israeli government directly.
Lord Michael Levy, Blair’s special envoy, warned then-Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer that there was no military solution, and that the campaign would only produce more suicide bombers.
The Israeli violations described in the files have only multiplied, even becoming routine across occupied Palestinian territory.
Officials also wrote of Red Cross staff threatened at gunpoint, and their ambulances not allowed to reach the wounded. Today, intimidation and targeting of medics has become standard operating procedure for Israeli forces and settlers.
The World Health Organization has documented 3,254 Israeli attacks on healthcare across the occupied Palestinian territory over 20 years, killing or injuring more than 4,200 patients and medical staff. More than half of those attacks – and the deadliest of them – have come in the past three years.
What the UK did next
Armed with the knowledge of Israel’s systematic human rights abuses, Blair’s government did act.
In 2002, it secretly halted arms exports to Israel for a time, after confirming British equipment was being used in occupied territory in breach of guarantees given.
But no UK government has gone as far as that brief embargo since.
As Israel’s violence escalated, the British response to it has diminished.
When, in 2008-2009, Israel killed about 1,400 Palestinians during 22 days of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, more than eight in 10 of them civilians, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown revoked licences for weapons on Israeli navy missile boats.
When Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza killed 2,251 Palestinians, among them 551 children, David Cameron’s government identified 12 licences for suspension. It also said it would act if hostilities resumed; it did not.
When Israel’s current genocidal campaign in Gaza had already killed 40,000 by September 2024, Keir Starmer’s government only suspended 30 of 350 arms licences for Israel. Campaign groups later reported thousands of munitions reaching Israel anyway. That toll now stands at 73,658 Palestinians killed, including 21,500 children.
That is the record Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government hinted it may finally break with, as the UK and 11 other countries this month backed restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
