• D61 [any]
    ·
    1 month ago

    ...government suspends Israel arms sales

    dean-smile

    its the UK and not the USA

    dean-frown

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    Arms sales to Israel have been one of the key factors in the UK’s complicity in genocide. According to Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), UK industry provides 15%, by value, of the US-made F35 stealth combat aircraft that has been used in the bombardment of Gaza.

    If the UK provides 15% of an F35 how much of a pain is that to shift to a different country? What specific parts is it and where else can they be acquired?

    • da_gay_pussy_eatah [she/her]
      ·
      1 month ago

      The better question is, will they stop shipping the F35 parts to be assembled, presumably in America? My guess is no

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 month ago

    This is an incredibly misleading article. The UK has not suspended arms sales to Israel. This "news" comes from a Jewish Chronicle article (JC is a known Zionist publication) and the rumour has spread from there. There is an ongoing government investigation into whether or not UK-made weapons are being used to commit war crimes in Gaza, which may have caused delays in new export licence applications (not existing applications or existing issued licences!), but there's absolutely not anything close to an arms embargo, and this disinformation is being deliberately spread in the UK to placate pro-Palestine protesters. Again, I repeat, the delays only affect new applications. The UK has so many existing military export licences to Israel that are still going full steam ahead.

    If, following the policy review, government lawyers find that Israel has engaged in war crimes, all exports would have to cease permanently.

    As I said above, the UK government has been trying to tie specific weapons to specific attacks, which they're going to have a harder time of than just proving "Israel is committing war crimes". Especially when it comes to F-35s; there's not really any way of knowing what plane dropped which bomb. You can find shrapnel to figure out what bomb was dropped, but F-35s can be loaded with a variety of weapons (which can also be loaded onto F-15s and F-16s, which Israel also has a lot of), so you couldn't tell it was an F-35 just from shrapnel. They've specifically structured the investigation to lead to the greatest chance of continuing arms exports to Israel.