The Gaza Footage Britain Withheld Just Got Very Expensive

My work is supported by you the viewers only, so if you'd like to help support some independent media and keep this sustainable, check the support options & merch as well as find me on other social media by clicking here. http://linktr.ee/KernowDamo Thanks for supporting me.

Right, so Britain would have us believe it is furious about the lack of justice in Gaza.

Furious enough to call Israel’s decision not to prosecute anyone over the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers back in 2024 as “shameful”. Three of those workers were of course British.

But apparently Britain’s anger fades as soon as someone suggests opening the filing cabinet of course, because when the families of those 3 British aid workers went to court to seek the British surveillance footage of Gaza - providing it to Israel as we blatantly were from RAF Akrotiri - from the MoD to help with their case for justice for their loved ones, Britain of course said no. Israel can have it but British families seeking justice can’t.

Meanwhile, Israel is busy pinning another gold star on its own chest for a job well done investigating itself and finding itself completely innocent of any wrongdoing over that World Central Kitchen attack hence it backfiring once more on the British state right now, but even worse than that is the timing, because as all of this is coming out, the British tax system is quietly still sprinkling Gift Aid like confetti on donations to treat Israeli soldiers just back from following their genocidal orders in Gaza, because nothing says ‘justice’ quite like a congratulatory handshake and a little tax sweetener courtesy of the British government for those poor, poor IDF soldiers. Why are we paying to help the mental health of IDF soldiers returning from Gaza, when we can’t even enable British people to seek justice for the loved ones, who lost their lives at the hands of this same IDF?

Why is Britain sitting on its evidence like Smaug on a pile of gold? And how many times does Israel get to mark its own homework in another sham of an investigation that is obviously anything but independent, before we all admit this ‘accountability’ charade is pure pantomime?

So let’s start with World Central Kitchen.

It was a clearly marked aid convoy wasn’t it? Its movements had been coordinated with the Israeli military. The vehicles were struck one after another on 1 April 2024, and seven aid workers were killed: three Britons, an Australian, a Pole, a Palestinian and a US-Canadian citizen.

Israel called it a grave mistake. There was an internal inquiry. Officers were dismissed and reprimanded. Then, more than two years later, the military prosecutor decided there would be no criminal investigation.

Israel had once again examined Israel and discovered that Israel need not trouble Israel any further.

Strange how often that happens isn’t it?

Not strange for the families, obviously. They were promised answers and got a military uniformed middle finger. Where is our government in this? Absolutely nowhere as usual, but Australia hasn’t held back.

Fair play for a show of balls the UK can’t show, where a single Australian citizen wins condemnation and yet three British citizens get what?

Well, Britain did sign a joint statement with Australia and Canada. Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty called the Israeli decision shameful and said the Government was appalled and angry. So it wouldn’t be true to claim that the British Government literally said nothing. It issued a strongly worded letter, and a joint one at that because apparently, we aren’t brave enough to offer one on our own either.

The words of a weasel in my book.

The problem is what happened when the words required Britain to do something.

Because on the day those workers were killed, an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft was flying over Gaza. The families have spent months trying to find out what Britain recorded and whether any of it could help explain the attack. The Ministry of Defence has refused to release the material.

Now because of that, we do not know that the British aircraft definitely captured the strikes. We do not know that the material would settle the case either. But the same is true of the opposite and the fact they won’t release the tape smacks of this far too pro-Israel government, be it under Starmer as it was then, or Burnham as it is now, hiding something for their benefit and not ours.

The Ministry of Defence has given an official reason for withholding it. In its FOI response, it said the footage was exempt on national-security grounds, relying on Section 24 of the Freedom of Information Act. It also suggested the material could relate to British special forces or MI6.

That is the Government’s position. Protecting intelligence methods and personnel can be a real concern.

But that is not the end of the argument, is it? “We cannot put it on YouTube” is not the same as “nobody independent can ever examine it”. We’re talking about a court case. Restrictions on the actual evidence can be imposed. The footage can be preserved. It can be reviewed under safeguards. It can be made available to a coroner, to an independent investigation, or to the families’ lawyers on terms that do not hand Britain’s surveillance capabilities to the entire world.

Instead, the MoD has treated national security like a get out of jail free card and I’m sorry, but people are entitled to be suspicious about that.

Three British citizens were killed. Israel has now closed off criminal proceedings. Britain says that outcome is shameful. So the obvious question is not whether the MoD should dump raw intelligence online. It is whether Britain is using secrecy to avoid helping establish what actually happened to its own dead and begging the question of everybody as to why that is.

Britain may hold material relevant to the killing of three of its own citizens, could blow Israel’s nonsense self-investigation claims out of the water, if they are so ‘shameful’ and the families might get some justice finally if they release it appropriately.

So, so much for all the righteous outrage. Turns out condemnation is just a bargain-bin special when you’re not willing to actually do anything about it.

And the longer that footage stays hidden, the more obvious the question becomes: is the Government protecting an intelligence capability, protecting a relationship with Israel, or simply protecting itself from what the material might force it to actually do?

Well without knowing what it actually saw, we can only guess.

And then we come to the money.

Not a weapons contract. Not a payment to a named Israeli unit. Not proof that any soldier receiving treatment had anything to do with the World Central Kitchen killings.

The arrangement is this: the UK charity UK Toremet confirmed that it made a restricted grant to Israel’s Yahalom Foundation for PTSD treatment. Yahalom’s own fundraising material included a therapeutic programme for soldiers returning from Gaza, and the recipient organisation says it supports people serving in, or who have served in, the Israeli military.

Donations made through British channels could qualify for Gift Aid. That is not just a little tick-box on a charity form. It is the state topping up the donation. So public money then.

If somebody gives £100, signs a Gift Aid declaration and has paid enough UK income or capital-gains tax, the charity can reclaim another £25 from HMRC. The donor pays £100. The charity receives £125. It costs the donor nothing extra because the extra £25 comes from tax revenue that would otherwise remain in the public pot.

Not every donation qualifies. The donor has to make the declaration and have paid enough tax, and the charity has to meet certain rules. But where Gift Aid is claimed, it is not simply private generosity floating about for fun here. It’s our money going to the IDF/

So when UK Toremet turns an eligible donation into a grant for Yahalom’s PTSD treatment programme, the question is why the British taxpayer should be asked to add 25 pence to every qualifying pound going towards an organisation whose beneficiaries include serving Israeli soldiers, including soldiers returning from Gaza?

That is the bit they’d rather reduce to charitable admin detail, but it isn’t. It is a political choice, made with our public money.

A tax break. A state top-up.

A political choice to make this particular donation go even further and not because somebody privately chose to give a donation, but because the Government decided that gift should receive preferential treatment.

A private donation does not remain entirely private once the Treasury adds public money. That is the whole point of Gift Aid. It is a tax subsidy designed to support charitable purposes.

And yes, trauma treatment is ordinarily a humane thing isn’t it? The sort of thing you’d ordinarily give to a charity over. But Gaza is not an ordinary case, is it?

The question is why the British state should give a tax advantage to support people serving in a military accused of committing genocide, while Palestinian victims are buried under the consequences of that military’s actions and where British people have also been killed and yet they can’t get justice for that?

That is not hostility to mental-health care. It is simply refusing to pretend that care exists outside politics, outside war, or outside the question of who Britain chooses to help.

I want the British Government to explain why British tax relief should subsidise an organisation whose beneficiary base includes serving members of a foreign military. A military that is accused of grave violations in Gaza and repeatedly relies upon its own internal systems, avoiding independent scrutiny like it has leprosy, to decide whether anybody should face criminal scrutiny.

That is not a complaint about therapy. It is a complaint about the British state pretending the word “charity” causes every political and ethical question to not matter, because they do.

As things currently stand, once a payment has been laundered through the Gift Aid machine, all traces of war, soldiers, and awkward questions are supposed to just disappear and what’s left is a spotless charitable halo, floating serenely over Gaza with a Treasury stamp slapped on for good measure.

Sorry, but no. It’s not good enough and we’ve known about this for a while now. If Burnham is supposedly so much better than Starmer, then why am I still waiting to see some actual change here?

UK Toremet says the grant was restricted to PTSD treatment. Well, OK then, show the due diligence you undertook. Show how the money was ring-fenced. Say whether people currently serving in the IDF were eligible. Explain what checks were made, what monitoring followed and whether HMRC or the Charity Commission ever examined this.

If every rule was followed, the public still deserves to know why the rules permit it. If a rule was not followed, then Gift Aid should be suspended or recovered.

That’s what actual scrutiny looks like. Not just waving the word ‘wellbeing’ around and hoping everyone gets too embarrassed to ask what’s really happening.

But where Israel have now signed off on one self-administered investigation here, they are now launching another one and guess what? They plan to mark their own homework here as well, this time with regards to the killing Hind Rajab.

Hind was five years old. In January 2024, she was trapped in a car in Gaza City with members of her family who had already been killed. She remained on the phone with the Palestine Red Crescent, pleading for somebody to come and rescue her. An ambulance was sent after coordination with the Israeli military. The two paramedics in it were killed as well.

For a long time, the Israeli military denied that its troops were in the area.

It now accepts that troops fired on the car.

So sit with that for a moment. First the Israeli troops were not there, so Israeli troops could not have done it.

Now they were there. Now they did fire. And now, more than two and a half years after a terrified five-year-old died in that car, under Israeli gunfire Israel has finally opened a criminal investigation.

An investigation is not accountability. It is the beginning of a process, not the end. This investigation should follow the evidence. It ought to.

But look at what arrived beside it on the very same day: the decision not to pursue criminal investigations into the World Central Kitchen strike.

One case is finally opened after years of denial. Another is shut after years of internal review.

You would have to be pulling a double shift in willful blindness not to spot the giant, flashing warning sign here.

Israel is still marking its own homework. Britain has just admitted that the marking in the WCK case is shameful. Yet on Hind Rajab, everybody is expected to admire the fact that the exercise book has finally been opened. Hurrah, Israel is doing the right thing they will proclaim, when actually it’s just pulling the same stunt again.

That is not cynicism for the sake of it. It is what the record shows us to expect now.

That is what gets lost when officials turn a dead child into a case number and an “incident under review”.

Her family had the denial. Then they had the delay. Now they have another Israeli investigation, announced alongside proof of what the last great internal process produced for the World Central Kitchen families.

Nothing criminal.

No prosecution. No independent reckoning. Just a decision from inside the same military system that was being asked to account for itself.

And Britain knows this system is failing. Its own ministers have said so in the WCK case. That makes the continued British evasions harder to excuse, not easier.

The Government cannot call Israel’s conclusion shameful, refuse the families access to potentially relevant British material, then discover a sudden attack of incuriosity when British tax relief is found supporting treatment advertised to soldiers returning from Gaza.

Those things do not prove one another. They expose one another.

You can see the same cowardice running through it all. Britain’s condemnation sounds hollow while the footage stays hidden. The Gift Aid story shows that support does not need to arrive as a weapons licence or a ministerial announcement. It can creep through the tax system where hardly anybody is looking. And every time we are told that Israel will investigate, the family of Hind Rajab and the WCK families are left waiting to discover whether that means justice for them or just another very long road to nowhere.

Meanwhile, people protesting Britain’s complicity in all of this have of course discovered that the British state is perfectly capable of finding its powers when it wants them, because its put them squarely in its sights. It can police, arrest and proscribe with remarkable enthusiasm, when their opponent is a direct action protester or a granny with a placard, Britain seems to have a remarkably high number of octogenarian terrorists compared to other countries. Yet ask it to investigate a tax subsidy, disclose potentially relevant surveillance material, or confront the implications of British citizens serving in the IDF, and suddenly every lever in Whitehall appears to have been disconnected for maintenance.

What a truly spectacular run of bad luck that must be? Who could have imagined it? Almost as if someone planned it that way.

The current Government did not create every part of this arrangement obviously. The Gift Aid issue predates Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister. But it belongs to his Government now.

That means he cannot hide behind the date of the first donation. His ministers now know about that. They know what Yahalom advertised. They know the WCK families want the MoD material. They know Israel has declined criminal proceedings in that case, making the optics for them and the UK all the worse. They know the IDF’s earlier account of Hind Rajab has now changed, but will another self-conducted investigation change anything material? More chance of see a pig take flight.

So the question is no longer what a previous government allowed to happen unnoticed, because Starmer’s chronic tenure in charge is thankfully over.

It is what this Government chooses to leave untouched now it carries the responsibility for all of that..

Ministers could do some very basic things. Ask HMRC to review whether the Gift Aid claims met every requirement. Ask the Charity Commission to examine the charitable-purpose and public-benefit questions raised by support reaching an organisation whose beneficiaries include serving foreign military personnel. Require proper grant transparency. Recover public money if any rules were breached. Review those rules if they weren’t given that UK public money is literally funding the rehabilitation of people accused of committing genocide. Decide whether Gift Aid should ever be available for schemes serving active members of a foreign military.

And if you think that is a question the Government ought to answer, do not leave it floating around YouTube for them to ignore. Don’t leave it in my comments. Write to your MP. Ask whether they support an HMRC review, Charity Commission scrutiny and full disclosure of the grant system. Ask whether they think British tax relief should be used this way at all.

Keep it factual. Keep it narrow. And when the reply arrives full of vague assurances and official porridge, put that online too, absolutely tell me about it, I’ll happily expose a few MPs given lousy responses to this.

They can ignore one email. They find it rather harder when thousands of people ask the same perfectly reasonable question: why are we still being made to pay for this?

And on World Central Kitchen, stop using intelligence secrecy as a brick wall. If the material cannot be released in full, explain what can be disclosed, preserved or placed before an independent investigator. Work with the families instead of making them drag every scrap of information out of the state, because that will mean the Government can no longer act as if care for Israeli soldiers and accountability for Palestinian civilians have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

They do not. British policy has put them in the same place.

So look at the full picture Britain has created.

Three British aid workers are killed in a coordinated convoy known to the IDF. Israel closes the path to criminal investigation. Britain calls that shameful but keeps its own potentially relevant surveillance material out of the families’ hands.

A five-year-old is killed after the military denies being present. The military later admits its troops fired on the car and opens another investigation of itself.

At the same time, a British charitable scheme has been quietly adding public tax relief to donations used for treating Israeli soldiers from Gaza.

Britain condemns. Britain withholds. Britain subsidises.

And somehow the people in charge still want to present all three as unrelated administrative matters that happened to land on the same desk.

They are not unrelated. They are the British model of complicity: moral outrage at press-release level, caution and concealment when accountability might cost them something, and quiet public support continuing through mechanisms most people were never supposed to notice.

That is Britain’s massive problem with justice for Gaza. It is not merely failing to confront the system that keeps finding Israel innocent. Britain is helping to cushion that system’s soldiers from the consequences of the war while withholding material that could matter to the families of its dead. It’s worse than hypocrisy, it should be a national flaming scandal.

And until the Government releases or independently reviews that Shadow R1 material, investigates the Gift Aid mechanism at play here, makes the grants transparent, and backs an accountability process outside Israel’s own military chain of command, “shameful” is not a verdict on Israel alone.

It is a confession about Britain as well.

For more on the already growing list of failings by this new Burnham administration in regards to such matters do stick with the channel for more, he’s getting no honeymoon period here.

Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t done so already so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content, as well as spreading the word and helping to support the channel at the same time, which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working-class people, and I will hopefully catch you on the next one. Cheers folks.