“Just the feeling of knowing these planes are taking off from here and people, children, might be dead. It’s heart-wrenching and infuriating, it gets me so mad. They’re off on a death expedition!”
Melanie Steliou, a Cypriot politician and campaigner against British bases in Cyprus fights back tears as she points at the RAF Akrotiri base from her car, while the camera of Declassified’s investigative journalists Phil Millar and Alex Morris settles on British soldiers enjoying the summer sun in their private beach bar The Chelona.
This is where British prime minister Keir Starmer visited Akrotiri in December 2024, memorably telling the service men (there were no women in the official photos) how proud he was of what they were doing, caveated with “but we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here”.
No wonder. And so begins the new Declassified documentary Britain’s Gaza Spy Flight Scandal as it reveals fresh details about Britain’s military cooperation with Israel during its genocide in Gaza.
The people of the island in the eastern Mediterranean have no doubt about what is going on at Akrotiri, one of two sovereign RAF bases that remain part of Britain’s colonial legacy. They’re sending fighter jets on death runs across the Middle East and spy planes to Gaza to aid Israel’s genocide.
The jets we first see taking off were actually bombing suspected militants in Iraq. Appalling enough – war criminal Tony Blair still shapes UK foreign policy – but the purpose of Declassified’s visit was to investigate the spy flights.
They were eventually rewarded for sitting outside the base into the early hours by capturing the first footage of one such plane – an American jet leased by the RAF – taking off.
Curiously, security at the base isn’t that tight. The local fishermen making their living from its shores tell of how the perimeter fence on the beach has been down for a year and people walk through it to swim on the other side. Swimming is allowed, filming strictly isn’t. Declassified gets close enough though.
It emerged in August that the RAF had outsourced its spy missions to Gaza to an American company Sierra Nevada Corporation, whose planes take off in the dead of night, location beacons almost completely turned off. In the film we watch Phil and Alex on “Britain’s hottest beach” waiting into the early hours for activity. In the dark and behind the dense foliage, they’re finally able to film a spy plane taking off – from the sands of Cyprus to the complete apocalypse of Gaza.
We then see Phil doorstepping generals and ministers, demanding how they justify sharing intelligence with an Israeli prime minister wanted for war crimes by the ICC, and sending planes over Gaza to provide intelligence to Israel. There’s defence minister John Healey, once head of communications at the TUC, someone I often enjoyed a friendly chat with when I worked a couple of floors up from him in Congress House, but now walking tight-lipped away from his interrogator.
We’re reminded of how the flights started a few months into the Gaza “war” (Declassified’s term) and that then defence secretary Grant Shapps insisted they did not have a combat role and were tasked solely with locating hostages, a policy continued by the Labour government. The reality is the planes have gathered thousands of hours of surveillance footage that government sources have confirmed have been shared with Israel.
As Steve Masters, a former engineering technician in the RAF says, as to whether such intelligence has been used to target civilians in Gaza, rather than just to locate hostages, as the Ministry of Defence claims, “I don’t think that’s a stretch of anybody’s imagination.”
He goes on to call on the government to release the footage and be held accountable for aiding a genocide, adding “if that means going to the Hague, so be it”.
The human impact of Britain’s role in the genocide, not just on the people of Gaza but internationally is stark and painful. An interview with the father of former marine James (Jim) Henderson, one of three British aid workers killed by an IDF drone, was hard to watch.
Jim’s father Neil tries to control his anger and grief as he says how insulted he feels by the MoD refusing to release footage on ‘security’ grounds. He describes looking at the television reports of the murdered aid workers, realising he was looking at his son in a body bag.
“How can the footage of a plane flying over Gaza, apparently just looking for hostages, affect British security? If it were released we’d get a better idea of what was happening on the ground. I don’t believe for a moment the IDF wasn’t there. I believe they [aid workers] were deliberately targeted. I could never believe Jim could be killed by a British ally.”
For anyone living near a military base, as I do, there is an anxiety about the planes we see in the skies above us. Melanie Steliou talks of the spy flights constantly taking off.
“We monitor them. We know what they look like. It should not be normalised because we live here, because we’ve been brought up with it. Every time you see one of these jets going off they are gathering information to give to the Israelis to target and bomb people, children, old people, women in Gaza. How can you feel that is normal? It’s not.”
Declassified’s documentary asks the question: Will this documentary put Keir Starmer behind bars?
If a former RAF engineer thinks Starmer should be in The Hague, then he should be. But apart from heaping more pressure on Starmer and his cabinet, I fear he probably won’t be, despite Declassified’s best efforts.