Three aid workers from the UK were killed by Israelis using a UK-manufactured drone, it has been revealed – adding insult to injury and leading to calls for the end of arms exports to that country:

Here are the facts, courtesy of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT):

The UK government and arms industry is complicit in Israel’s killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, including three British citizens. The workers were killed by a strike from a Hermes 450 drone manufactured by Elbit Systems. The Hermes 450 is powered by a UK-made R902(W) Wankel engine, produced by Elbit subsidiary UAV Engines Limited in the UK.

Former UK national security adviser Lord Peter Ricketts called for arms exports to be suspended yesterday (April 3, 2024). He has expanded on this in a thread on X in which he pointed out that this was not an isolated incident:

[For clarity: there has never been any evidence that Hamas has ever hidden personnel or weapons in any hospital in Gaza.]

It is certainly true that other aid workers have been targeted – 171 UNRWA representatives among them. Israel justified these war crimes by falsely claiming they were all supporters of Hamas. Sadly, their deaths have been treated differently from those of the World Central Kitchen people:

It is important to remember that Israel tried to lie about the airstrike on the WCK convoy:

This lie was debunked within hours, so Israel is now lying that its triple-strike on the WCK convey that was travelling on a route agreed with the Israel Defence Force, at a time that had been agreed with the IDF, was an accident.

WCK founder José Andrés was once a supporter of Israel. Now – understandably – he takes a different view:

And now that he has spoken out about what has happened, guess what? He’s being smeared as an anti-Semite:

They lie and they lie and they lie…

We already know the UK government is allegedly sitting on legal advice saying Israel is breaking International Humanitarian Law by committing its genocide in Gaza and arms sales there should be terminated.

Now it is facing intensified calls to stop such sales. Even before the WCK airstrike, more than 600 lawyers including three former Supreme Court judges called for arms exports to end:

In a letter to the prime minister, the signatories, who also include former court of appeal judges and more than 60 KCs, say that the present situation in Gaza is “catastrophic” and that given the international court of justice (ICJ) finding that there is a plausible risk of genocide being committed, the UK is legally obliged to act to prevent it.

The 17-page letter, which also amounts to a legal opinion, was sent on Wednesday evening and says: “While we welcome the increasingly robust calls by your government for a cessation of fighting and the unobstructed entry to Gaza of humanitarian assistance, simultaneously to continue (to take two striking examples) the sale of weapons and weapons systems to Israel and to maintain threats of suspending UK aid to Unwra falls significantly short of your government’s obligations under international law.”

As you can see, the letter “amounts to a legal opinion”, meaning the government can no longer even try to say it has not been advised to stop the sale of arms to Israel.

Continued refusal to do so will be evidence that the UK’s government is complicit in Israel’s genocide.

If that happens, we should all drag Sunak, Cameron and the other to The Hague ourselves.