Eurasia Press & News
Exclusive: Declassified captures first footage of an American spy plane taking off from a Royal Air Force base bound for Gaza.
We are standing on a sand dune in the pitch dark listening to the Mediterranean crash onto Lady’s Mile beach. The last Cypriot fisherman went home about an hour ago and the seaside bars have closed, leaving us alone save for the occasional white cats scurrying along the shoreline.
Unlike us, the cats can clamber through the wire fence outside Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri, the heavily guarded British airfield about a mile from our position. Free to roam, they must have a better view of the runway than us, as we peer through a 600mm telephoto lens perched atop a tripod.
The blazing sun has long since set and it’s getting cold now. Our only jumper is wrapped around the camera – protecting its precious electronics from condensation that would compromise its low light capabilities.
We were in plain sight of the last police patrol that drove past at midnight, but they left without stopping to inspect our press credentials.
Despite the isolation, we decided to camp out here 200 miles from Gaza – where the beaches are lined with the bodies of the dead and displaced – to investigate further how RAF Akrotiri is connected to Palestinian suffering.
Flight tracking websites show a privately owned American spy plane (call sign Crook12) periodically turns on its location beacon at this airfield. Sometimes it has left its tracking data on all flight, revealing it flew in circles over Gaza.
Officially helping Britain look for hostages held by Hamas, last December its sister plane Crook11 flew within three streets of a house in the Gaza neighbourhood of Nuseirat hours before Israel killed 34 civilians inside.
Breaking cover
Initially these planes, leased from America’s Sierra Nevada Corporation, flew during daylight hours with a predictable schedule. But after it was revealed that the RAF had hired them – to replace their own fleet – they switched to flying at night and drastically restricted the visibility of their location data.
For the last three nights Crook12’s location beacon has been completely switched off. By 2.20am, we are losing hope it will show up at all.
But then a sinister whir cuts through the sound of the sea, as propellers spool into life somewhere in the distance. Our phones ping as a nocturnal colleague in London informs us Crook12 (tail number N6147U) has momentarily turned on its location beacon.
Now is our chance to film this spy plane taking off.
We want 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.
The trouble is, we still cannot see where the noise is coming from. We pace the sand dune looking for a better vantage point. Our tired minds start playing tricks on us. Are those lights to the west new, or have they been on all night? Are they moving? No.
A frantic half hour slips by before a plane taxis into a gap in the tree-lined runway. A flashing red wing light finally betrays its distinctive silhouette.
The plane – a Beechcraft 350 – looks grayer than in photos we’ve seen, but its shape is the same. Crucially, a series of blimps protrude from the top of its fuselage, where state-of-the-art surveillance gear is mounted.
One of us watches with the naked eye as the other trains the camera onto the aircraft. We wait anxiously to discover if it is actually possible to film anything at 3am from almost a mile away. Fully zoomed in, it is easy to lose sight of the plane, as the slightest adjustment to the tripod arm causes the frame to shift dramatically.
The camera’s ISO light sensitivity – normally set to 200 for a day time shoot – is at 128,000. On most cameras this would look like a grainy sea of black noise, but we think the sensor in our camera can still record usable footage on this setting.
A handful of flood lights on the runway work in our favour, until the plane starts to take off and motor towards even darker parts of the airbase, vanishing out of sight.
We pan right, manually focusing while trying to predict where the plane will break out through the treeline when it lifts off. Twenty seconds later, we spot the plane rising above Akrotiri, its fuselage briefly illuminated by the blink of its navigation lights.
Rising smoothly into the sky, it banks left and turns south towards Gaza before disappearing out of range. Exhausted, we play back the camera footage, relieved to see we got the shot – with just ten minutes of battery left.
Spying for Israel
Our footage confirms that Crook12 is still active at RAF Akrotiri and flying towards Gaza under the cover of darkness. After we filmed it on 27th September, its tracker has flashed on seven more nights.
Together with the RAF’s own fleet, these spy planes have flown more than 600 missions around Gaza since the Conservatives launched this programme in December 2023.
In this time, just eight hostages have been freed from Gaza using military force, compared to 135 released through ceasefire deals.
Operation Arnon, the raid which freed four hostages in June 2024, saw hundreds of Palestinians killed in the process. Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which refuses to be interviewed by Declassified about these flights, will not tell parliament if it supplied footage for that fatal rescue mission.
Nor will it clarify how it ensures Israel does not use the intelligence from Britain for its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. And questions remain as to why the flights have lasted for so long, given that Gaza is such a small strip of land.
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?
