LAST month, the government went to the High Court to fight for its right to continue enabling genocide. The British government is facing a judicial review brought by Al-Haq, challenging the exemption of F-35 parts from a partial suspension of arms exports to Israel. The court is expected to take months to decide the case, until at best autumn of this year, all while more and more civilians are bombed and starved, many of them children. The Labour government should not need a court order before it does the right thing.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning stealth fighter has been the mainstay of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza since it began, flying well over 8,000 missions over Gaza, bombing hospitals, shelters, ambulances, food and medical stores, water purification plants and refugee tent camps and causing a large proportion of the deaths and horrific injuries inflicted on the people of Gaza.

The F-35 is a high-tech aircraft, first introduced in 2015, that is designed to allow it to perform a variety of combat roles, but with a particular emphasis on “strike” missions, that is, air-to-ground attacks of the kind that have levelled most of Gaza, with devastating casualties. But it requires high levels of maintenance after each mission, so much so that the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) complained that — in peacetime, without the additional wear and tear of combat operations — only 55 per cent of the whole US fleet of the aircraft was “mission-capable” and that the backlog of parts required for repairs had more than doubled in just six months, from 4,300 to over 10,000.

The problem wasn’t a new one. In 2019, the GAO reported that parts issues were already causing “low readiness rates.” But the 55 per cent figure was a rosy picture, according to the US Project on Government Oversight (POGO) last year, which reported that the F-35 is only capable of its full range of operations 30 per cent of the time, describing it as the “part-time fighter jet.”

With the help of its international partners to provide a huge push on parts and maintenance, Israel is reported to be using its F-35s at five times the normal rate and keeping three quarters of its F-35 fleet in the air, with almost 40 of the aircraft flying missions over Gaza daily. But this requires a massive effort: according to military industry magazine The War Zone (TWZ), F-35s would “become a brick very fast” without constant access to the spare parts “sustainment ecosystem,” and without it, even if Israel kept a few aircraft in operation for even a “truncated period of time,” their capabilities would be massively “degraded.” This applies particularly to a modern fighter like the F-35 — as TWZ editor-in-chief Tyler Rogoway put it, “The more advanced the faster the degradation.”

Britain contributes around 15 per cent of the parts essential for keeping Israel’s F-35s operational and capable of attacking, including ejector seats, rear fuselage parts, active interceptor systems, targeting lasers, weapon-release cables and aircraft defence systems.

Keir Starmer’s government, which last year refused to include F-35 components in its token “ban” on weapons and systems to Israel that affected only around 8 per cent of the total, has admitted that it is “likely” that exported F-35 parts are used to violate international humanitarian law. Despite this admission, it is also arguing in court that “the impact of suspending F-35 components on operations in Gaza is likely to be minimal” because the “IDF is one of the most significant and well-equipped militaries in the world.”

This flies in the face of the evidence when even the US struggles to keep its fleet operational because of parts issues and, Britain licences for F-35 parts to Israel was used 14 times more in 2023 than at any time previously, according to freedom of information requests by Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT).

Defence Secretary John Healey acknowledged this when he said that suspending F-35 exports would cause a “profound impact on international peace and security.” The government is trying to have its cake and eat it, desperately seeking to minimise the political fallout, and no doubt the legal culpability of ministers in possible future war crimes trials, of continuing to ship parts to a government committing genocide and other crimes daily.

But the F-35 is only a small part of the overall picture of British government participation in genocide, even excluding the political cover and blanket of silence that it provides daily despite ever more horrific crimes.

According to the government’s “Strategic export controls: quarterly licensing statistics,” the UK sent more arms to Israel in the final three months of 2024, after the 8 per cent “ban,” than in all the preceding four years from 2020-23 combined. This escalation included the secret use of British military aircraft on at least seven occasions to deliver F-35 parts directly to Israel.

The government’s argument in court for the continued supply of F-35 parts to Israel has scraped through the bottom of even the toughest barrel. Its lawyers have argued that the “security” need to keep parts available around the world overrides Britain’s obligations, which are unequivocal under international law, to intervene to prevent genocide and war crimes and both that “no evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children” and that “there is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians,” despite Israel’s known heavy use of the heaviest US-made “dumb bombs” on densely populated civilian areas and the tent camps of refuges in supposed safe zones.

The government’s claim also flouts the clear evidence, provided by the United Nations as well as by every international, including Israeli human rights and humanitarian group, that Israel’s blockade is inflicting starvation on Gaza, putting huge numbers of civilians and especially children, at “imminent” risk of starving to death. According to Unicef in mid-May, “71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers … need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition.”

In reality, the British government could inflict rapid degradation on the ability of Israel to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza just by imposing a ban on parts for a single aircraft type, that would also send a clear message to other governments still prevaricating over their obligations to take every available action to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The effects of this action, both militarily and politically, would be massively amplified if Britain did its legal duty and imposed the complete arms embargo demanded by human rights groups and campaigners.

All of this is possible right now. The Starmer government should not need a court order before it does the self-evidently right thing, and it must not drag its feet while the court process grinds on and more civilians in Gaza are killed. Every socialist, every decent human being, must demand nothing less on the streets and directly to the British Parliament and of their MP.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019–24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.