UK to suspend some arms sales to Israel, foreign secretary announces

https://news.sky.com/story/uk-to-suspend-some-arms-sales-to-israel-foreign-secretary-announces-13208593

Posted by topotaul

11 Comments

  1. 30 out of 350 licences, sounds like a drop on the water but it’s impossible to tell – those 30 could be 90% my volume 🤷‍♀️

    I’d prefer it if we weren’t allowing any exports given they are now very much the aggressors in this conflict.

  2. So now they have admitted there is suspicion of war crimes being committed, and have stopped less than 10% of the sales which will do absolutely nothing to sway the anti-genocide crowd and will completely alienate the racists they’ve been pandering to for the past year?

    amazing. just amazing.

  3. Agreeable_Falcon1044 on

    I mean some is better than none…but if there’s a case to halt those, there’s surely a case to halt the lot.

    This stopped being about fighting terrorism and freeing hostages months ago now. It’s pure aggression against everyone and anyone, driven on by an extreme ideology. There is no desire to show constraint, limit civilian casualties or even negotiate hostage releases. They just want to kill and flatten.

  4. We should have been at the sanctions stage months ago.

    We shouldn’t be enabling a genocide at all.

  5. Sorry, how can you suspend *some* of them because you’re worried about Israel committing war crimes?

    Suspending any of them is an admission that Israel are doing something wrong, in which case they should all be suspended immediately.

    These half measures are just an attempt by Lammy/Starmer to protect themselves from The Hague.

  6. SlightWerewolf4428 on

    Don’t like it, but glad it won’t make any difference to Israel’s fight against Hamas.

    If the Labour government wants to take token measures like this, fine.

  7. For context:

    [By April 2024, Israel was estimated to have dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_bombing_of_the_Gaza_Strip#:~:text=By%20late%20April%202024%20it,combined%20during%20World%20War%20II.) That is more than double the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during WWII.

    There have been forecasts that crop yields in 2025 will be markedly down and climate danger points accelerated specifically because of this level of bombing. Israel is no longer just a danger to Palestinian citizens: it has become a danger to the world.

    Multiple aid organisations including the Red Cross have talked about how their vehicles and workers have been explicitly targeted by Israeli armed forces in order to dissuade them from helping wounded and starving Palestinians. British citizens have been shot and in some cases killed by Israeli forces that are being armed by British manufacturers. This is not a new phenomenon either: [Tom Hurndall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall) was a British photojounalist who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper whilst attempting to document Israeli crimes in the West Bank in 2004. He was 22.

    The scale of the massacre is now beyond even the capability of Western governments to ignore. This is a genocide, and our Conservative and Labour governments have been actively aiding it by vetoing and then abstaining from UN resolutions to condemn Israel.

    You could say ‘enough is enough’, but ‘enough’ was a long, long time ago.