The American leasing company was awarded $472m contract by US Special Operations Command in June and is developing US military’s new long-range spy plane

Since December 2023, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had been flying the same Beechcraft King Air 350 plane over Gaza and sharing the intelligence with Israel, but now this programme appears to have ceased, and is instead being undertaken by the new US-leased private plane.

The British planes, which are called Shadow R1s in UK service, have flown near-daily from RAF Akrotiri, Britain’s sprawling airbase on Cyprus, for almost the entire duration of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

But the last RAF spy flight over Gaza from Akrotiri was on July 25, within days of the new US plane coming into operation on the same route. During the US plane’s first five trips over Gaza, it was accompanied by the RAF plane in an apparent training exercise.

For the 20 months of UK spy flights over Gaza for Israel, the planes had turned off their transponder about half way to Gaza so activity over Gaza had stayed secret.

On 28 July, however, the newly-trained US plane took off at 8pm and forgot to turn off its transponder. The flight path of a surveillance flight from RAF Akrotiri was visible for the first time. It shows the plane reaching Gaza at 9pm and circling over southern Gaza for an hour and half, concentrating its surveillance efforts over Khan Younis and surrounding areas.

The new US-leased spy plane, which flew from RAF Akrotiri on 28 July, circles over Khan Younis area for three hours.

  • FishFace@lemmy.world
    33·
    3 days ago

    Well this is the opposite. They RAF turned their transponders off when they were doing these secretive flights. Spying for Israel during a genocide means being a direct participant in it.

    OK so after a few comments it seems you are willing to make a political point - but one which was not at all clear from merely posting an article with a dump of mostly-irrelevant detail.

    The UK government position is that it is only sharing information with Israel that could be of use in returning hostages. You are characterising these flights as “spying for Israel” and “being a direct participant in genocide.” Where have you got your information from? Or are you just surmising that, since the UK is taking part in spy flights over Israel, it must be “spying for Israel”? Because that seems like an incredibly weak argument. We shouldn’t just trust implicitly that the government is telling the truth when there is military secrecy around, but that doesn’t mean the opposite is true.

    Kid Starver seems to have reached a point where he is trying to look less complicit and is now trying to shift the blame to a US company.

    Your shitty name-calling aside, it’s more likely to be for boring operational reasons, isn’t it. If it’s taking off from and returning to Akrotiri it’s not actually shifting the blame at all.