British Spy Planes Conduct Reconnaissance Near Gaza Amid Prisoner Exchange
Flight data reveals British Royal Air Force surveillance operations near Gaza during Israeli prisoner releases, raising concerns over intelligence-gathering activities.
Watan-Navigation data from the “FlightRadar” website, which specializes in tracking aircraft, revealed that two British Royal Air Force reconnaissance planes flew near the Gaza Strip. This coincided with the delivery of the four batches of Israeli prisoners between January 19 and February 1.
According to the website, the two aircraft took off near a British airbase in Cyprus, headed toward the Israeli coast, then disappeared from radar screens before reappearing on their way back to Cyprus.
The British website “Declassified,” which conducts research on military and intelligence institutions, reported that “the Royal Air Force sent two reconnaissance planes toward Gaza since the start of the ceasefire during the prisoner exchange process between Hamas and Israel.”
The site added, “The first surveillance flight took off from the British Akrotiri Air Base at 13:32 GMT and returned at 18:59 on January 19, the day the ceasefire agreement came into effect.”
It continued, “The aircraft disabled its transponder over the eastern Mediterranean, raising questions about its exact mission in the air while Hamas was releasing the last remaining British captive, Emily Damari.”
The site also noted that “the second flight departed from Akrotiri Air Base on January 25 at 09:26 GMT and returned to the base at 15:44, once again disabling its transponder over the eastern Mediterranean during the second prisoner exchange operation.”
The British Ministry of Defense was quoted as saying that “the aircraft did not enter Gaza’s airspace and operated at all times in accordance with the ceasefire agreement and the prisoner release deal between Hamas and Israel.”
However, the website argued that “this denial does not prevent the Royal Air Force’s Shadow R1 reconnaissance aircraft from capturing surveillance footage of prisoner movements from Israeli airspace or gathering further intelligence to support Israel elsewhere.”
The British Foreign Office stated that the surveillance planes were “unarmed” and that their mission was “solely to locate the hostages,” according to the same website.
It considered this response to “raise serious questions about why spy planes continued to be sent to the region during the prisoner releases.”
Al Jazeera documented multiple and intensive flights carried out by the same British aircraft model over at least 14 months of the Israeli war on Gaza.
The Times newspaper had previously reported that British Royal Air Force spy planes began surveillance and reconnaissance operations in December 2023, weeks after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They conducted almost daily missions over the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip to assist the Israelis in locating the hostages captured by Hamas in October 2023.
On January 19, a ceasefire and a three-phase prisoner exchange agreement came into effect, with each phase lasting 42 days, with negotiations for the second and third phases contingent on the progress of the first. The deal was brokered by Qatar and Egypt with U.S. support.
With American backing, between October 7, 2023, and January 19, 2025, Israel committed genocide in Gaza, resulting in more than 159,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded—most of them children and women—along with over 14,000 missing persons, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.
