David Lammy may have misled parliament over UK arms exports to Israel

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has welcomed the findings of a ground-breaking report published on 7 May: Exposing UK arms exports to Israel. The report, written by Progressive International, Palestine Youth Movement (PYM), and Workers for a Free Palestine, uses data from the Israel Tax Authority to reveal the scale of UK arms exports to Israel.

This data shows shipments of military goods, munitions of war, arms and arms parts. Notably, this included the export of over 8,000 separate munitions since the government’s partial suspension of export licences in September 2024 up until March 2025.

UK arms exports to Israel: has Lammy misled parliament?

Whilst the government suspended direct exports of F-35 components to Israel in September, they created a loophole that allows spare parts to still reach Israel if they go via another country such as the US, in order to not:

undermine the global F-35 supply chain that is vital for the security of the UK, our allies and NATO.

However, evidence from this report now shows that the UK are likely to have continued to supply F-35 jet components to Israel. This contradicts statements senior government ministers in the Department for Business and Trade and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office made in the House of Commons.

The report concludes that the Foreign Secretary appears to have misled parliament and the public regarding arms sales to Israel. Specifically, this is in relation to his statement that:

much of what we send [to Israel] is defensive in nature. It is not what we describe routinely as arms.

UK trade data more opaque than genocidal Israel’s

Opaque trade data in the UK and broad customs codes (encompassing both military and non-military items) makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions. Therefore, the UK government must release transparent and complete licensing and export data. This would be in order to clarify the nature of these good and to allow a full investigation of these shipments.

Indeed, the organisations who authored the report criticised the opacity of the UK arms export regime. Jeanine Hourani of PYM went so far as to say:

We actually could glean more about what the UK is sending to Israel from Israeli data than from UK data. This is really shocking.

The report is published less than a week before the High Court hearings for a legal challenge to the UK government’s continued arms sales to Israel, filed by Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and the UK-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), with support from the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians.

Featured image via the Canary