Britain will send surveillance aircraft, two Royal Navy support ships and almost 100 Royal Marines to the eastern Mediterranean from Friday to support Israel and help prevent any sudden escalation of warfare in the Middle East.
Patrol flights of Poseidon P-8 aircraft and other aircraft will begin on Friday, Downing Street announced, tasked partly with monitoring any efforts to transfer weapons from countries such as Iran or Russia to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Existing UK military units and fighter aircraft, based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, are also on alert as Israel gears up for an anticipated ground attack on Gaza after last Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas, which has left more than 1,300 Israeli civilians dead. The death toll in Gaza has climbed above 1,400.
Concern remains high that Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, may aim to open a second front from the north with the support of its ally, Iran.
Earlier on Thursday, Syria said that its airports in Damascus and Aleppo were bombed by the Israeli air force, most likely in an effort to disrupt any supplies of weaponry bound for the group.
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said the UK’s intention was to ‘support efforts to ensure regional stability and prevent further escalation’, and to ‘ensure humanitarian aid reaches the thousands of innocent victims of this barbaric attack from Hamas terrorists’.
Earlier this week, a US aircraft carrier, the Gerald R Ford, arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, with a cruiser and four destroyers in support, aimed also at preventing any actor from ‘seeking to escalate the situation or widen this war’.
The UK’s naval task group is quite smaller, consisting of support ships. It’s led by the RFA Lyme Bay, a logistics support vessel, and RFA Argus, the Royal Navy’s emergency medical ship, which has a capacity of 100 beds.
The Ministry of Defence said this was ‘a contingency measure’ to support humanitarian efforts, although it wasn’t immediately spelt out who they would be assisting. Gaza is subject to an Israeli blockade.
Britain already has two warships in the region, HMS Duncan, assigned to NATO, in the eastern Mediterranean, and HMS Lancaster, part of the UK’s permanent naval presence in the Perian Gulf.
Downing Street also said that Rishi Sunak had spoken to Egypt’s present, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, earlier on Thursday as part of an effort, No 10 said, to ‘understand the wider regional picture and underscore the importance of supporting civilians to leave Gaza’.
But here we go, sticking our noses into other people’s conflicts. We’re not the world’s police force.
The UK is spending enough to support Ukraine currently, and now they need something useful to do with all that excess cash floating around. In the meantime, back home, the cost of living crisis and collapse of education and the NHS continues unabated due to disastrous underfunding.
Our government should stop getting us involved in wars that have nothing to do with us and focus on sorting out the chaos they’ve created at home. Not only that, if they get involved and poke their nose in other people’s war, they put the UK at risk of terrorism even more than we have now.
Where on earth do they get all this equipment from? Isn’t all of ours in Ukraine at the moment – imagine if we got invaded.
I’m not sure why the United Kingdom needs to get involved. Don’t the US have huge assets already?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 