The UK government has suspended some arms sales to Israel, saying there is a ‘clear risk’ the equipment could be used to commit serious violations of international law.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK would be suspending 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel, affecting equipment such as parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones.
OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM UK
An Israeli minister said that the decision sent the ‘wrong message’ and was ‘disappointing’, but human rights group Amnesty International UK called the suspension ‘too limited’.
HOW THIS AFFECTS ISRAEL – UK RELATIONSHIP
Mr Lammy said the UK continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself, and this did not amount to an arms embargo.
Speaking to Radio 4, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, Amichai Chikli, said the decision had come ‘at a very sensitive moment’ when Israelis were burying six people ‘murdered in Hamas tunnels’.
‘I think we need to combat terrorism together,’ he told the World Tonight programme. ‘The fight against Isis [the Islamic State group], and al-Qaeda and Hamas, it’s the same war between the Western civilisation and radical Islam.
‘The threat that is coming from Hamas is also an inner threat that you are facing in the streets of the UK.’
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in response to the decision that Israel operated according to international law.
Writing on social media, the chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said the move ‘beggars belief’ and ‘feeds the falsehood that Israel is in breach of International Humanitarian Law’.
