A secret internal trade policy review conducted by the British government, which examined whether to suspend Israel’s tariff-free trade access to UK markets, was hidden from Parliament and the general public before officials ultimately opted to keep the preferential agreement in place, according to reporting from Sky News.
The review was commissioned in August 2025 by the Department for Business and Trade during Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister. At that time, widespread famine was already unfolding across the besieged Gaza Strip, a humanitarian catastrophe widely documented as a deliberate consequence of Israeli restrictions on food, water and aid access to the territory.
Ministers launched the impact assessment against a backdrop of rapidly growing global outcry over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, as well as its accelerating expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, entrenched apartheid governance over Palestinian populations, and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities across occupied territories. Three months prior to the review, the ruling Labour party had already paused negotiations for an expanded bilateral free trade agreement with Israel, after then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy called remarks from Israel’s defense minister — who openly stated the goal of “cleansing” Gaza and “destroying what’s left” of the enclave — “repellent” and “monstrous”. Despite this public rebuke, the existing 2019 UK-Israel Trade Partnership Agreement, which grants tariff-free entry to nearly all Israeli goods entering the UK, remained fully intact.
When the question of modifying the trade deal was raised in Parliament that October, then-Trade Minister Chris Bryant defended the government’s choice to retain preferential access. He argued that existing export ties to Israel supported thousands of UK domestic jobs, and warned that suspending the agreement would carry risks of unpredictable outcomes and major economic harm to British businesses. What Bryant did not disclose during the parliamentary debate is that he has longstanding deep ties to Labour Friends of Israel, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group within the UK Labour party. Bryant previously served as vice chair of the organization, and has accepted all-expenses-paid trips to Israel funded jointly by the group and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The existence of the classified impact assessment only came to light after advocacy organization Global Justice Now submitted a formal freedom of information request to the Department for Business and Trade. Even following the confirmation that the review took place, government officials have refused to release any details about the assessment’s scope, its findings, its scheduled timeline, or any policy outcomes that came from the internal examination.
The secret review unfolded at a moment of mounting global pressure for targeted economic measures against Israel over its actions in Palestinian territories. Around the same time the UK conducted its internal assessment, the European Union faced growing public and political demands to suspend portions of its own trade agreement with Israel, and ultimately tabled a proposal to roll back some of Israel’s preferential trade concessions. The UK review also came more than one year after the International Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling requiring all UN member states to end any trade or commercial activity that supports Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in occupied Palestinian land.