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The UK government secretly weighed suspending its trade agreement with Israel last summer, running a formal impact assessment on the move and then hiding it from Parliament and the public.

Getting into it: First reported by Sky News, the review was carried out by the Department for Business and Trade in August 2025 and examined suspending the UK-Israel Trade Partnership Agreement, a 2019 post-Brexit carryover deal that hands Israeli imports preferential tax treatment and waives tariffs on most of them. It was one of several responses officials were considering to Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, and it came the same month famine was formally declared there.

The UK had already suspended talks on a broader free trade deal three months earlier, after then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy called comments by Israel’s defense minister about “cleansing” Gaza “repellent” and “monstrous.” But nobody touched the 2019 deal itself.

The assessment only came to light because the campaign group Global Justice Now filed a freedom of information request, which the department answered this month by confirming the review existed. Officials refused to release almost anything about it, withholding the scope of the assessment, the dates it was ordered and completed, and any decisions that followed from it.

Crucially, when MPs directly questioned ministers in Parliament about the status of the trade deal, the government never disclosed that suspension had been on the table.

The government’s public defense of the deal leaned on economics. Then-Trade Minister Chris Bryant told the Commons in October 2025 that “exports to Israel support thousands of jobs in the UK,” and he warned in a written response that suspending preferential treatment “risks unpredictable consequences and significant economic disruption for British businesses.”

Tim Bierley of Global Justice Now called it “another mark of the Starmer government’s moral cowardice” that officials “quietly buried the results of this assessment instead of pulling every lever available to pressure Israel,” noting the inaction came during “a particularly brutal escalation of Israel’s campaign of bombing and starvation.” He also pointed out that the agreement “contains a binding clause that makes respect for human rights an ‘essential element’ of the deal,” and asked, “In what world is the duty to ensure tariff-free trade stronger than the duty to prevent and stop genocide?”

This all comes as the UK’s new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, has signaled that UK policy related to Israle could be shifting soon. In an interview, Burnham said his party “didn’t get it right” on Gaza and must do more, though his government has yet to announce any change to the trade agreement.