Declassified documents show UK aware of Israeli war crimes for 24 years

British diplomats condemned Israeli conduct in the occupied West Bank as a pattern of human rights abuses in 2002 – 24 years before London took a tougher stance towards Israel this week.

These decades-old condemnations are contained in UK Foreign Office files written during the administration of former Prime Minister Tony Blair while Israel undertook a brutal 2002 offensive in the occupied West Bank.

The files, released in 2024 and reported in a recent investigation by the website Declassified UK, record British diplomats describing a pattern of abuses by a state their own government would go on to arm for the next two decades.

Today, Blair sits on the Board of Peace that presides over Gaza, where Israel’s disregard for Palestinian lives and the rules of war has been demonstrated on a genocidal scale, while the UK’s newly seated leadership refer to Israel’s actions as “a stain on the conscience of the world”.

But what did the British government already know about Israel’s actions more than 20 years ago?

That record begins in March 2002, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield in retaliation for a wave of attacks by Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas.

Israeli forces tore through the occupied West Bank, killing 500 Palestinians in a single month, mostly civilians, and injuring another 1,500.

British officials were deeply aware of the scale of violations committed by Israeli forces.