The value of Israeli military goods imported into the UK multiplied by more than 100 times during the war on Gaza, an analysis of international trade data by Action on Armed Violence has revealed.
Figures from the UN Comtrade database show that UK imports from Israel of arms, ammunition and related parts increased from just £55,000 in 2023 to almost £5.9 million in 2025. That is equivalent to around a 10,589 percent rise during two years in which Israel was found by a UN commission to have committed genocide in Gaza, claims it has denied. The figures represent imports into the UK as a whole rather than government spending, so customers could include both public and private end-users.
The British army and police forces would appear to be among the purchasers, having announced they were spending tens of millions of pounds on Israeli weaponry during the two-year period.
But the revelation of the sharp increase will raise fresh questions about the scale of defence procurement from Israel at a time when the UK government has faced strong pressure from campaigners and opposition politicians to reduce military links with the country. Martin Butcher, a senior policy advisor at Oxfam, said: “It is appalling that the UK has so sharply increased purchases from Israel, boosting Israeli profits and therefore helping pay for the Gaza genocide and risking complicity.” Major deals secured The data suggests that the imports began accelerating in 2024, shortly after the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, when the value of UK purchases from Israel reached £1.36m, before rising sharply again the following year.
The figures will include the 2023 contract which Israeli defence company Elbit Systems secured to provide drones, surveillance radar systems and training technology to the British Army. The same year, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems signed a £20m deal to equip Britain’s Challenger 3 tanks with its Trophy active protection system.
In 2024, Israeli surveillance companies supplied technology to British police forces , while drone manufacturer XTend received a £1.93m Ministry of Defence order. The following year, Elbit won a £16m contract to supply night-vision equipment to British armed forces.
Even as imports surged, the UK government barred an Israeli government delegation from attending Britain’s largest arms fair, the DSEI UK defence exhibition in London last year.
“The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its military operation in Gaza is wrong,” a UK government spokesperson told the BBC when explaining the ban.
Israel condemned the decision as discriminatory and withdrew its planned national pavilion, although individual Israeli defence companies were still allowed to exhibit. RELATED Investigation urged over illegal UK arms shipments to Israel Searches of the UK’s official trade data portal returned no import figures that corresponded with the UN data.
Butcher from Oxfam said: “It is disgraceful that no arms import data is published here, and that UN data must be used to uncover these shameful facts.”
UN annual arms import figures can also fluctuate significantly depending on the timing of deliveries, but experts usually accept that analysing trends over a five-year period is generally considered a reasonable approach for identifying longer-term patterns. Other data sets such as Trading Economics show the same rise in UK imports of Israeli military goods.
Globally, the UN data showed that Israeli exports of arms and ammunition have increased substantially in recent years, rising from £1.05 billion in 2021 to £1.83bn in 2025 , their highest level on record.
Human rights groups and researchers have long argued that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has effectively served as a testing ground for military and surveillance technologies later marketed internationally. The post Revealed: Israeli arms imports to UK surged during Gaza war appeared first on Declassified UK .