As the Gaza Freedom Flotilla approached Palestinian waters, a British spy flight took off from a British military base on Cyprus to surveil Gaza. Despite the recent narrative shift on relations with Israel, Britain remains deeply involved in the genocide of Palestinians, its efforts centred around its RAF Akrotiri military base on Cyprus, using it to launch these spy flights, which send intelligence, including targeting data, directly to the Israeli military. These bases are colonial relics, hosting American troops and intelligence agents, an affront to Cypriot sovereignty and a stain on Britain’s international standing; they must be shut down.

In May, Britain said that it had suspended trade talks with Israel regarding a new trade agreement, as well as sanctioning a handful of West Bank settlers and companies involved in settlement construction.  This action was accompanied by the harshest words that Foreign Minister David Lammy has had for Israel since the beginning of the genocide in 2023, directly criticising Israeli ministers’ “extremism” but falling short of identifying Israeli actions as genocide.

These actions and words have been severely undermined and ring hollow in the face of Britain’s continued support for Israel’s actions. Only weeks after the suspension of trade talks, so-called ‘Lord’ Ian Austin, a government trade envoy, arch-Zionist, and lead Corbyn-saboteur, appeared in Haifa promoting trade relations with Israel. Weeks prior,a report by the Palestinian Youth Movement and Workers for a Free Palestine showed that British arms exports to Israel had increased since the partial arms license suspension in 2024, raising suspicions that these measures made little impact or acted as a smokescreen for support to continue.

Trade and arms exports, although important, are not Britain’s primary material contribution to Israel’s genocide in Gaza; intelligence is. This intelligence is gathered through British military bases in Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, and RAF Dhekelia. These bases are not leased from the host country, Cyprus, but are British sovereign territory similar to overseas territories such as Gibraltar or Bermuda, but without autonomy, elections, or any form of civilian administration. As such, Cyprus has no power over the bases, which make up 3% of its landmass, and any accountable officials do not govern them, their effective leader being a military officer in the Ministry of Defence in Westminster, currently Air-Vice Marshal Peter Squires, Commander of British Forces Cyprus.

The Cyprus bases have always had an intelligence role, with the British decision to retain and illegally separate the territory from Cyprus upon its independence in 1960 made in part due to their usefulness as a listening post and signals gathering station in West Asia. In 1974, the US prevented a British plan to close the bases due to their significant signals gathering capabilities, and agreed to pay an unknown level of base costs in return for their continued operation and increased US access. The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) leads the intelligence aspect of the bases, an even more secretive and unaccountable branch of the state than the Ministry of Defence.

British spy missions to Gaza from Cyprus consist of piloted Shadow R1 planes, which tend to conduct missions in excess of five hours at a time, often multiple times a week, since October 2023. The reporting on this has been spearheaded by Matt Kenard, who has tracked the flights and brought international attention to them. He has shown that these flights will continue to take off in June 2025. These planes have the ability to collect detailed optical intelligence, in practice meaning they can see objects and events on the ground in high quality, as well as other sensors. This data is passed directly to Israel and presumably used to help direct attacks in Gaza. It is well established that Israel is massacring large numbers of civilians in Gaza, leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, all with the assistance of British intelligence.

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Credit: Matt Kennard / Declassified 2023

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The bases are also being used to transport military cargo to Israel, have potentially hosted Israeli air force planes, and may act as a waypoint for US Special Forces’ transport to Gaza. The bases have myriad nefarious functions, acting as an extremely effective multi-purpose asset for UK and US support for Israel’s genocide. None of these functions are isolated but are coordinated for maximum effective support to Israel, with the highest level of secrecy maintained. The bases make a perfect location for such operations; unaccountably governed and militarised colonies have historically been useful for such functions. The bases’ importance is directly influenced by the nature of its status as a colony, deeply undemocratic with no enfranchised local population, a justice system in a murky grey area, under military rule, and maintained under occupation with force alone.

The use of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands in occupied Mauritius is a similar use case, with no local population (long since expelled) and no civilian administration. The base may rival Akrotiri in its importance to UK military operations abroad, although with even more direct US control than in Cyprus. In that case, only international pressure and International Court of Justice (ICJ) intervention forced the UK to cede the territory back to Mauritius in a yet-to-be-implemented deal, which will keep the bases open, but sovereignty technically transferred.

The Mauritius precedent shows that the transfer of sovereignty is not a silver bullet, as it does not automatically mean that bases will close; however, it should be seen as an important option and a step towards greater accountability and pressure. The Cypriot government, as with the Mauritian government, is complicit in the bases’ operation. Cyprus has claimed sovereignty of the base areas and at times attempted to negotiate their ceding; however, it has not pushed the issue and has not made any effort, as far as publicly acknowledged, to influence the bases’ operations since 2023, let alone agitate for their transfer. In fact, Israeli and British military planes have likely used airports in Cyprus proper since the genocide started, as revealed by Genocide Free Cyprus, and as seen in Figure 2, the US maintains a military presence in Cyprus beyond the British-occupied areas.

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Part of RAF Akrotiri (Credit: Google Maps)

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The Palestine and anti-genocide movement in Cyprus, led by groups such as Genocide-Free Cyprus, is pressuring the Cypriot state to reduce its vassalage to Western interests. They are pushing the state to assert its sovereignty over the occupied British areas and to use their leverage to affect operations at the bases. This movement will be crucial in ensuring that Cyprus does not sell out and keep the bases open in any sovereignty deal, as Mauritius has.

In the UK, CODEPINK Britain has started a campaign to close the UK-US bases in Cyprus, supported by groups including Stop The War and the Peace and Justice Project. CODEPINK held a demonstration outside the Ministry of Defence in March, and has lobbied for the issue to rise up the agenda of Palestine and anti-war groups. Independent MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, and Adnan Hussein have raised the issue in parliament, thrusting the UK-US bases off Cyprus campaign into the heart of Westminster. Based in the imperial metropole, British movements have a duty to address the bases as a colonial issue and must leverage their power to hold the British state to account. British movements must oppose not only the bases’ involvement in genocide, but their existence as an imperial package of unchecked militarism, US vassalage, and unaccountable occupation.

Closing the bases on Cyprus and withdrawing British troops and intelligence agents is a real possibility, not an idealistic goal. Throughout the bases’ history post Cypriot independence, Britain has toyed with their closure under pain of high maintenance costs, diminishing capacity for interference in West Asia, and embarrassment of a post-colonial anomaly eviscerating British claims to comply with the rules of a fair international order. In 1974, 2004, and 2010, plans were made to either close the bases, cede a limited amount of land to Cyprus, or reduce British troop presence. US interests in keeping the bases open and using them for their own intelligence operations have been a major factor in their staying open, but a renewed spasm of militarism and a ballooning military budget under Keir Starmer seems to have reduced chances of any changes to the status quo in this government’s term. Either way, campaigning against the bases is of crucial importance, and in the wake of Israel’s ever more untenable and unstable international position, activists must keep pushing and drawing attention to the bases as long as this genocide continues and beyond.

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Alfie Howis is an activist and writer with CODEPINK London.

Featured image: Genocide Free Cyprus sign at RAF Akrotiri (Source: CODEPINK)

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