Britain to conduct surveillance flights over East Med

Britain’s defence minister will be conducting surveillance flights over the eastern Mediterranean and Gaza, the government said on Tuesday, attempting to locate hostages.

Contacted by the Cyprus Mail to comment on whether the flights would be out of the sovereign base area in Akrotiri, the ministry said no other information except for the flights occurring was available.

The aircraft will be unarmed, will not have a combat role, and will be tasked solely to locate hostages, the UK government said, adding that only information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant authorities responsible for hostage rescue.

This is the not the first time the UK has been in the news for military operations out of Akrotiri, as reports in the last few weeks have pegged that the UK was also lending its base to the Americans to also conduct operations in Gaza.

A few weeks ago, a report, which was on UK Declassified citing Haaretz newspaper in Israel, said that the US was using Akrotiri to supply arms to Israel in the continuing attack on Gaza, following the Hamas attack on Israel last month.

According to information from Declassified, US weapons and equipment are likely being delivered to RAF Akrotiri from US bases in Turkey, Spain and Germany.

On October 18 and 24, the US flew two huge C-17A Globemaster military transport planes to RAF Akrotiri from its air base at Rota in southern Spain. On October 25, the US flew another C-17 to Akrotiri from Ramstein air base in Germany, the site of NATO’s air command, the report said.

Both Nicosia and London denied the Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) on the island are being used as a conduit for weapons transfers to Israel amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza. But the UK government’s reluctance to provide any information as to what materiel is in fact being airlifted to Israel via Akrotiri, while neither proving nor disproving the proposition, appears to leave the matter an open question.

The issue surfaced when UK defence news website Declassified UK also reported that the RAF had made over 30 military transport flights to Tel Aviv since Israel began bombing Gaza. When contacted, the British defence ministry declined to provide the news outlet any detail of the cargo or personnel on the flights, identified by open-source logs.