Discover how US and UK forces are deeply entangled in Israel’s military operations in Gaza, providing crucial intelligence and military support that goes beyond mere diplomatic engagement. From covert missions to strategic air bases, learn how these Western allies are using embassies and humanitarian covers as fronts for espionage and military actions, raising questions about international law and diplomatic immunity. As tensions escalate, explore whether these actions could provoke retaliation against Western facilities in the region, setting a dangerous precedent for future conflicts in the Middle East.

As reported by The Cradle, several Western-allied states have fully supported Israel’s cruel nine-month military assault on Gaza, not only by supplying the occupying army’s war machine with a wide spectrum of arms and ammunition but also by participating directly in the conflict. The United States and Britain, for example, have contributed critical reconnaissance and intelligence data, as well as deploying special forces to aid Israel in military operations.

According to a New York Times story dated June 8, US forces helped the Israelis retrieve four Israeli hostages from Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 274 Palestinian civilians and three more captives and injuring over 698 more. According to the paper’s Israeli sources, the US and UK offered intelligence from the air and internet that Israel couldn’t access its own.

On May 29, the Declassified UK media project stated that London permitted an unprecedented 60 Israel-bound flights utilizing cargo planes departing from the UK’s RAF Akrotiri air base in Cyprus, which is secretly used by the US Air Force to transport weaponry to Israel.

The British government has not released the contents of the air cargo conveyed, claiming that no “lethal aid” was involved. Instead, London argues that RAF flights to the occupation state are used to assist its “diplomatic engagement” with Tel Aviv and repatriate British subjects, which is an unusual use of military aircraft given that Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport is still open for ordinary passenger travel.

Since shortly after the war began, London has vigorously invoked its D-Notice, a military and security regulation aimed at prohibiting media outlets from publishing material that could jeopardize national security, notably regarding British airborne Special Forces (SAS) activities in Gaza. No additional information has been provided after the instruction was issued on October 28, 2023.

How western intel penetrates West Asia

However, all of those concealment measures were exposed during Israel’s disproportionate military operation to gain the release of hostages during the recent Nuseirat camp tragedy. Trending videos showed an Israeli helicopter landing adjacent to the recently erected $320 million US “aid pier,” as well as ‘aid trucks’ carrying special operations personnel accompanied by armored vehicles during the operation.

The media then stated that dozens of US and UK drones aided in the attack on the Nuseirat camp, presumably by providing reconnaissance services to the Israeli military.

These incidents highlight not only direct Western military participation in the Gaza conflict but also the brazen use of diplomatic cover or humanitarian work to plan and carry out military actions that have resulted in mass civilian casualties and war crimes, as described by many United Nations institutions.

The concern now is whether Western infrastructure and troops will be targeted as the war spreads, potentially to Lebanon, given the clear collaboration of Western powers in Israel’s aggressions, particularly those that violate international norms and law.

Although the use of embassies and civilian institutions as bases for intelligence gathering and special missions is not a new practice, dating back at least to the nineteenth century, current technological and computing advancements have enabled these facilities to act as spying and eavesdropping centers, monitoring and storing information for an entire country.

What was once unimaginable has become a reality thanks to wireless connectivity and the Internet. Signal intelligence, previously obtained by planting eavesdropping and listening devices, may now be accessible using a standard smartphone, with data routed to these centers within sovereign governments.

‘Second-biggest US Embassy in the world’

The second largest embassy in West Asia – and the globe – spans around 174 thousand square meters and is located about 13 kilometers from Beirut, the Lebanese capital. The new US Embassy in Beirut is only topped in size by the one in Baghdad’s “Green Zone.”

Aside from the embassy’s vast size and expense of nearly a billion dollars, there are other doubts concerning the need for such facilities and what they contain.

The embassy’s computer-generated graphics depict a complex with multi-story buildings, tall glass windows, entertainment rooms, a swimming pool surrounded by flora, and views of the Lebanese capital. According to the project website, the complex consists of an office, representative housing for employees, communal facilities, and related support facilities.

According to the Intelligence Online website, the enormous billion-dollar building will feature a data collection center, preparing the site to serve as US intelligence’s new regional headquarters. According to the study, “Lebanon is considered a safe and strategic location for the deployment of intelligence agents already in the region as well as new personnel, who are selected directly from Washington-based agencies.”

Although precise information about the design of this embassy is impossible to obtain, excavations below ground level, the use of reinforced concrete in the structure, and its fortified location on top of a hill all point to more to its operations, especially given several precedents of the US Beirut diplomatic mission being implicated in intelligence services’ work.

The 1983 bombing of the American Embassy resulted in the deaths of eight CIA personnel, including the agency’s leading West Asia analyst and Near East director, Robert Ames, station chief Kenneth Haass, James Lewis, and the majority of the CIA’s Beirut workforce.

Because of Lebanon’s proximity to the sea and two British NATO facilities in southern Cyprus, Dhekelia and Akrotiri, reinforcements or helicopter transfers could arrive quickly on Lebanese land, the embassy served not just as a CIA center but also as a crucial regional intelligence facility. In 2020, Washington used an Osprey chopper to smuggle its operative Amer al-Fakhouri out of the US embassy.

British Watchtowers on Lebanon’s borders

On May 3, Lebanon revealed that an official delegation and a senior British intelligence officer had visited the country the previous month to discuss the installation of additional UK-built watchtowers. These are in addition to the more than three dozen watchtowers built by Britain during the Syrian war along Lebanon’s sensitive border with Syria.

According to leaks reported by Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper, the British delegation asked the Lebanese army “to approve a plan to establish watchtowers along the border with occupied Palestine, similar to those existing on the eastern and northern borders with Syria.”

Following the low-key visit, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati stated that “establishing the towers and taking measures along the border are Israel’s conditions for stopping the war with Lebanon.”

Last February, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry received an official Syrian protest notice, which classified the British watchtowers as a threat to Syrian national security on multiple levels. The primary threat is the tower systems’ sophisticated intelligence and espionage technology, which “shines deep into Syrian territory and collects information about the Syrian interior.”

According to Al-Akhbar’s analysis, “the information output from this equipment reaches the hands of the British, and the Israeli enemy benefits from the output to target Syrian territory and carry out strikes deep inside Syria.” The Syrian memorandum also mentions “the presence of some British officers at the Towers.”

Security cameras monitor the surrounding area at a border point on Lebanon’s border with Syria (Photo: Lebanese Army Command, Orientation Directorate).

The 38 British watchtowers that purport to assist Lebanese authorities in “combating smuggling” instead generate a slew of issues, including the reasons behind the construction of so many of these structures. Why, too, do the towers contain thermal monitoring, eavesdropping, signal intelligence, and communications equipment, especially given Tel Aviv’s close relationship with London and the occasional presence of British officers in these towers under the guise of training the Lebanese Army?

A commanding officer of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), interviewed in August 2021, disputes London’s public pronouncements concerning the towers, saying: “The aim of the towers today is to monitor the movements of Hezbollah and the Syrians.”

Dutch special forces in Dahiyeh

In March, Hezbollah arrested six Dutch military soldiers operating discreetly in Dahiyeh, a southern Beirut suburb with multiple Lebanese Resistance offices. The detainees, who were discovered with hundreds of thousands of dollars in military equipment on their person and in their vehicles, claimed to be working undercover for the Dutch Embassy in Lebanon.

During the investigation, the Dutchmen said they entered the southern suburb as part of a training exercise to evacuate Dutch nationals and diplomats in the case of a war. However, no Dutch embassy nationals lived in that region. It was also discovered that the personnel had not announced their mission to the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lebanese security forces, or their country’s embassy.

That same month, a Spanish man was arrested for filming in the same southern Beirut district, only to find out later that he possessed a diplomatic passport and that his phone had advanced software that blocked access to its contents.

These occurrences, as well as several other examples, demonstrate that some Western countries continue to use Western diplomatic and civilian facilities to gather intelligence or conduct special operations training in independent Lebanon.

These actions are a clear breach of the Vienna Convention on International Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which ban embassy diplomats from engaging in espionage activities. These acts endanger not only civilian populations, but also the country’s thousands of professional diplomats, all diplomatic posts, and civilian structures used as cover for illegal operations. They also bring ordinarily immune diplomatic installations into the legal framework of “hostilities,” either intentionally or unintentionally.

This threat is exacerbated by Israel’s recurrent transgressions of diplomatic and international standards, which are either overlooked or defended by Western ally states. Most Western capitals did not denounce Israel’s unprecedented military strikes against Iran’s consulate building in Damascus in April, allowing it to dodge UN Security Council censure.

Because the fundamental value of international norms is the precedent and event upon which this law is based, the possibility that such Western-supported attacks will backfire wildly and result in retaliatory targeting of Western facilities and embassies grows – all in the context of new legal precedents and customs that no longer prohibit strikes on suspect non-military facilities.

It is unclear how far Western governments can hope to retain their double standards in the administration of international law and conventions, especially if the Gaza war they are actively supporting spreads to Lebanon or other West Asian territories.

The Resistance Axis, which has normalized military strikes on Israel, missile attacks on Israel-bound shipping vessels, and weekly strikes on US and UK naval fleets in the last nine months, is only one escalation away – a declared war on Lebanon – from creating a new set of target banks that outnumber their previous ones.

Does this include the US embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the region and the world, with 10,000 American personnel and military, or, closer to home, the US embassy in Beirut, the second largest in West Asia?

It is difficult to conceive that such facilities will remain unaffected if Western involvement continues, which we already know to be a steady, daily supply of munitions to fuel Israel’s war engine and give Tel Aviv military information and target banks.

It will be far more difficult to secure diplomatic missions if they are shown to function primarily as military command centers or intelligence hubs during wartime. Targeting these sites, which are already in violation of the Vienna Convention, can easily fall under the umbrella of self-defense and reciprocity as long as Western states and Israel continue to normalize illegal operations.

If the Gaza war sets whole new norms of engagement in the region, do Israel’s Western allies expect to emerge unhurt in a larger battle? How do they think they can use military force against a country while remaining secure in its capital city?

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