Just days before Ed Miliband announced trade sanctions on Israeli settlements, more than 300 British soldiers participated in a “landmark” training exercise facilitated by Israel’s largest arms firm.
Elbit Systems UK boasted about its “key role” in the three-day training exercise which saw the soldiers battling against simulated forces in one of the largest ever exercises of its kind in the UK.
The exercise, named Pegasus Athena, represented a “step change in capability for the armed forces”, according to the company, because it allowed troops to train “without the need for external assets and… ammunition stockpiles”.
This training is just one small example of the enduring and tightly entangled role of the Israeli arms industry in Britain’s defence sector.
Declassified has found how over recent years the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded scores of major tenders to Israeli weapons firms, worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Israeli technology can be found in one of Britain’s key air defence systems as well as in missiles used by the Royal Air Force, while the Royal Navy relies on Israeli-made anti-missile systems and British soldiers train on simulators designed by Elbit.
In Miliband’s speech, the British foreign secretary said Britain’s finding that the Israeli occupation is unlawful brings it in line with the advisory opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024.
That ruling found Israel’s occupation unlawful, but also obligated all states “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation” created by the occupation.
The Israeli arms industry is tightly bound up with the Israeli state, and profits from the occupation by supplying the military hardware, ammunition, and surveillance used to enforce it.
It follows that international clients, including Britain’s MoD, are sustaining the occupation by awarding contracts to Israeli arms firms while benefitting from the occupation by purchasing items that have been “battle tested” on Palestinians.
The closeness of Israel’s arms industry with Britain’s military raises further questions not only about how difficult it would be to separate the two, but also the extent to which defence integration limits the prospects for meaningful diplomatic pressure on Israel.
Genocide scholar Martin Shaw told Declassified: “The government’s acceptance that the occupation is illegal means that it should act against Israel itself, not just the settlers it has installed.
“The ICJ was clear that states must do nothing that provides ‘aid or assistance’ to Israel in maintaining the occupation, and must ‘ensure that any impediment’ that the occupation causes to the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination ‘is brought to an end’.
“Through the UK’s military alliance with Israel and its comprehensive military-industrial cooperation, Labour still appears to be failing in these legal duties, despite Miliband’s announcements”.
Training exercises and simulations
Pegasus Athena was far from the first British military exercise assisted by Elbit.
In 2023, Elbit won MoD contracts to “develop and provide artillery and mortar training simulators” for the army and to “design, provide, maintain and operate” a simulation trainer for Boxer armoured vehicles and Challenger tanks.
The company’s Interim Combined Arms Virtual Simulation has also been “benefiting the British army since 2022” and was deployed that year in what it said was “the largest field army exercise in Europe for the past decade” involving 3,500 troops and up to 800 vehicles.
Another asset developed by Elbit Systems, the Joint Fires Synthetic Trainer, has “delivered over 12,000 hours of training to British armed forces and NATO allies” over recent years.
In addition to simulations, Elbit Systems won a five-year MoD contract in 2021 worth £102m for a Dismounted Joint Fires Integrator which “allows frontline soldiers to detect and engage enemy targets in seconds”.
Last year, Elbit UK delivered Ground Based Surveillance Radar systems to the UK’s Royal Artillery under a £14m contract signed in 2023, which “enhance the situational awareness of personnel on the ground”.
In 2021, Elbit UK became part of a joint venture named Affinity Flying Training Services Ltd to be awarded a £65m contract lasting 12 years for the operation of Texan T-C6 trainer aircraft for the UK Military Flying Training System program.
Another major MoD programme facilitated by Elbit, the Maritime Electronic Warfare System Integrated Capability, is helping British navy ships with anti-missile defence. This followed a £103m contract awarded to Babcock and Elbit in 2021.
The system “will be installed on current and future warships including the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, Type 45 destroyers and Type 26 and Type 31 frigates currently in build”, the government said last year.
Subsidiaries of Elbit UK have also played a key role in supplying the MoD over recent years.
In 2021, Instro Precision won a £11.5m contract to supply the British army with night vision goggles, with further purchase orders totalling over £16m made over subsequent years.
U-TacS, a joint venture between Elbit UK and French arms firm Thales, oversaw the £2bn Watchkeeper programme which supplied the British army with deficient drones.
Elbit’s Hermes 450 drones were also procured by the British army in 2007 under Project Lydian for operational support in Afghanistan at a cost of around £200m.
Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, told Declassified: “This important investigation exposes precisely why the UK government’s recent measures are largely performative and designed to whitewash the multifaceted, shameless complicity of the UK with Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide.
“The UK has failed to end the economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory, as it is obliged to do in order to comply with the ICJ ruling.
“It is absurd for the UK to sanction settlements while simultaneously purchasing and integrating Israeli surveillance and weapon systems that are field-tested on Palestinians into its own armed forces.
“Comparing these largely symbolic measures with the far-reaching sanctions imposed by the UK on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine affirms the UK’s colonial hypocrisy and loss of credibility on the international stage”.
Rafael
Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, Israel’s largest state-owned arms firm, has also been awarded major contracts by the MoD over recent years.
In 2024, the company was part of a consortium awarded a £38m tender for the procurement of systems to develop counter-drone capabilities for combat soldiers.
Rafael also won a £20m contract alongside Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land in 2023 for “cutting-edge new rocket and missile protect systems for Britain’s Challenger 3 tanks”, which are scheduled to enter into service next year.
In addition to this, the Israeli state-owned company supplies the “brains” for Britain’s Sky Sabre air defence system, which is deployed at sensitive sites such as the Falklands.
When Rafael won the Sky Sabre contract in 2017, a defence executive said: “Everybody was extremely surprised the MoD opted for Rafael. Politically, industry thought that was a route the UK government wouldn’t go down…It makes you wonder just what parts of the local defense industry the government is willing to defend”.
Rafael also manufactures Litening pods which are used by the Royal Air Force’s Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets for precision targeting capabilities.
Closer to home, Rafael owns a subsidiary named Pearson Engineering in Newcastle which recently won a £10m contract to supply the British army with “26 Track Width Mine Ploughs”.
The contract was awarded without any competition for “technical reasons”, indicating how no other provider was able to supply the items.
Project HEZUK
Documents published by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) have indicated the value that the MoD has placed on UK-Israel defence collaboration.
Around 2019, the British defence attaché in Tel Aviv, Jim Priest, prepared a presentation on Project HEZUK, a secret defence plan between the UK and Israel aimed at countering Iran and Hezbollah.
One of the slides focussed on joint UK-Israel defence collaboration, naming several of the “existing programmes” such as the Sky Sabre and MFTS.
Notably, Priest also outlined several “UK-ISR Joint Areas of Investigation” which included “autonomous warfare”, “space”, and “maritime”.
Next to a bullet point on Research and Development (R&D), Priest further outlined “Quantum, Additive Manufacturing, poss[ible] investigation on energy weapons and novel defence systems”.
In addition to military collaboration, Britain’s intelligence relationship with Israel will be untouched, according to Miliband, and there are no signs that either the 2020 UK-Israel military cooperation agreement, nor the 2023 Road Map for UK-Israel bilateral relations will be suspended.
In response to Britain’s sanctions, Israel has said it will close the British consulate in East Jerusalem, remove UK representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre in Kiryat Gat, and terminate Britain’s role in training Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank.
Omar Barghouti added: “The UK has very clear obligations under international law, as triggered by the ICJ decisions of 2024 about Israel’s plausible genocide and its illegal occupation and apartheid.
“The UK must end all military, intelligence, trade, financial, academic and other relations with Israel that enable its illegal occupation, apartheid or genocide, as the ICJ has called for”.