Declassified UK have managed to record a US spy plane leaving a UK air base in Cyprus:
NEW — Gaza spy plane spotted leaving UK air base on Cyprus
by @pmillerinfo & @alex_macondo
Exclusive: Declassified captures first footage of an American spy plane taking off from a Royal Air Force base bound for Gaza.https://t.co/x1l5YUPyrb
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) October 7, 2025
The plane was “bound for Gaza“, according to Declassified UK. It’s an important sighting, because the plane has flown without its tracker turned on while making previous flights, making it impossible to monitor.
Spy games – exposed by Declassified
In the UK, Declassified UK and other independent journalists have spearheaded reporting on the UK military’s involvement in flights over Gaza from RAF Akrotiri:
We reported in July that the UK would consider a request by the ICC to hand over surveillance footage from Gaza. The Times only just picked up on it today https://t.co/PRZ4vHKfzh
— Phil Miller (@pmillerinfo) October 25, 2024
The British media claimed that Palestine Action may have damaged the planes at RAF Brize Norton “beyond repair”, potentially costing the UK over £30mn.
Flight tracking data now shows the ZZ338 aircraft, one of the two targeted by Palestine Action, is already back in the air. pic.twitter.com/f4eqHnuA34
— John McEvoy (@jmcevoy_2) July 2, 2025
Read my full investigation for @PDeepDive here
https://t.co/rfYGj48p05
— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) October 6, 2025
Journalists Phil Miller and Alex Morris captured the spy plane footage for Declassified UK. In their write up, they explained that they’d seen the plane’s tracker ‘periodically turn on its location beacon at this airfield’. The purpose of recording the plane was:
to confirm if these split second flashes on the tracking website actually result in surveillance missions – or if the plane never leaves Akrotiri. There have been five such pings since the UN Commission of Inquiry declared there is a genocide in Gaza.
On the night that they captured the footage, the beacon momentarily turned on. As they noted, it’s turned on several more times since then.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence hired a private US security firm to send spy flights over Gaza.
Declassified’s @pmillerinfo & @alex_macondo camped outside RAF Akrotiri to capture the first footage of these planes deploying to Gaza to collect intel for Israel
— John McEvoy (@jmcevoy_2) October 7, 2025
The official narrative is that the RAF is providing surveillance capacity to help Israel locate the hostages in Gaza. There are some issues with this narrative, however, as Miller and Morris highlighted:
When terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 school girls in Nigeria, the RAF sent a Sentinel spy plane to help look for them. Taking off from neighbouring Ghana, the Sentinel “mapped the whole of Nigeria” in 10 sorties and located the school girls within the first few weeks.
So why does Israel, with its vastly more advanced surveillance capabilities than Nigeria, really require so much assistance from Britain’s spy flight programme?
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has said in the past that Israel wouldn’t halt the war even if there was a deal to release hostages.
Featured image via Pedro Aragao
By Willem Moore
This post was originally published on Canary.