A new documentary by Declassified UK shines fresh light on Britain’s collaboration with Israel during its sustained assault on Gaza, and asks whether the evidence could put Prime Minister Keir Starmer behind bars.
Presented by Declassified editor Phil Miller and directed by the outlet’s video editor and filmmaker Alex Morris, ‘Britain’s Gaza Spy Flight Scandal’ takes place in Cyprus, where the team captures first of its kind footage of a Royal Air Force (RAF) flight taking off from the Akrotiri base.
The filmmakers are shown around by Cypriot politician Melanie Steliou, a leading campaigner against surveillance sharing. They stake out a beach near the base all night, blending in with the last fishers on shift to evade the authorities, before capturing the jet’s departure.
The very next day, on 27 September 2025, close to 100 Palestinians are killed by Israeli air strikes.
The film pieces together this type of unambiguous evidence of Britain’s intrinsic and sustained collaborative role in Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
Declassified had previously revealed that between 3 December 2023 and 27 March 2025 at least 518 British surveillance flights were conducted above Gaza. Starmer visited the Akrotiri base within his first six months in office, telling troops ‘we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here’.
That last declaration might as well have been a memo to the UK mainstream media: there has been scarce coverage of this British military collaboration over the last 26 months of Israel’s systematic annihilation of Gaza.
While Britain has offered unconditional diplomatic support to Israel, welcomed wanted war criminals onto its soil, and dutifully repeated robotic renditions expressing ‘deep concern’ over the situation in Gaza, the film reveals what the government has been concealing all along. Yet as Starmer paid tribute to the RAF personnel, his foreign secretary, David Lammy, was confidently telling the media no such operation in Gaza existed.
By shedding light on this reality and placing it in the wider context of British complicity in Israel’s genocide, the documentary has drawn praise from veteran filmmaker Richard Sanders, who said it is the kind of work that should have come from major television platforms such as BBC Panorama or Channel 4 Dispatches. But where the mainstream media falls short, Declassified UK has stepped into the void.
Palestine Deep Dive revealed in August that the RAF had started outsourcing its spy flights to the US-based Sierra Nevada Corporation, adding another layer of secrecy to these operations. The film reveals there have been at least 116 surveillance missions carried out by American contractors– one of which Miller says is captured leaving ‘the calm of Cyprus to the apocalypse that is Gaza’.
The UK Ministry of Defence insists these flights are solely gathering information to aid hostage retrieval. But when asked in the film whether real-time intelligence can be prevented from being used for battlefield purposes, former RAF engineering technician Steve Masters was unequivocal: ‘I don’t think you can.’
There are also notable cases of RAF spy missions coinciding with major Israeli assaults, including the killing of British aid workers in April 2024. The team speaks to the family of James Henderson, one of the victim.
‘I really do believe they were deliberately targeted,’ Henderson’s father says, visibly emotional. The UK government refuses to release the footage of Gaza from the day he was killed, a response his father calls ‘woeful’.
The film lays bare Britain’s entanglement in one of Palestine’s bloodiest chapters, and the catastrophic, multi-layered ramifications. This is reporting done properly: the facts presented, the details woven in, the picture painted with clarity, and consequently, the archive enriched in the process.
It is the kind of forensic work Starmer might have once championed in his early career as a human rights lawyer but that now leaves him uncomfortably exposed, and possibly at risk of trial at The Hague.