Israeli Foreign Ministry paid Reform £50,000 for trip
Israel's foreign ministry paid over £50,000 for a Reform UK delegation trip that toured occupied land while Gaza starved, Declassified UK reveals.
Atef Abu Khater was thirteen years old when his father buried him. He had weighed close to sixty kilos before the siege tightened. By the time he died of malnutrition in Gaza City last August, he was, in his father Aaed’s words, “barely over 25 kilos, just bones.” “Imagine looking at your child, and you can’t feed him,” Aaed Abu Khater said.
Around the time children like Atef were dying of starvation that United Nations monitors had classified as catastrophic, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was writing a very different kind of cheque. Declassified UK has revealed that the ministry paid the Jerusalem firm Conexión Israel more than £50,000 to run a six-day tour for a delegation from Reform UK, the party that tells British voters it answers to no one. This is what the Israel lobby’s money buys inside the Reform party: access, itineraries, and silence about a famine.
The Israel lobby’s price for a Reform party delegation
The November 2025 trip, uncovered in Israeli government records by the Berlin-based journalist Yossi Bartel, took Reform figures including then-chairman David Bull, board member Gawain Towler, Lancashire council leader Stephen Atkinson, London Assembly member Alex Wilson, and Richard Tice’s aides Ryan Powell and Rafaella Stefani to Israel at the foreign ministry’s expense. Atkinson and Wilson declared £4,861 each in their registers of interests. Bull called the trip “life changing” and pledged that “Reform UK will always stand with the Israeli people.” Towler described the cause as “our fight… for enlightenment ideals, international norms, democracy.”
Two months earlier, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice had made his own trip, a £6,500 visit funded not by the foreign ministry but by a newly formed group called Reform Friends of Israel. He met President Isaac Herzog and foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar. He came home and wrote, in The Conservative Woman, that the Gaza famine was “a blatant lie.” He wrote that while the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system was recording 470,000 people, 22% of Gaza’s population, in Catastrophe conditions. The World Health Organisation confirmed famine in Gaza that same month, the first time it had ever done so. Its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called it “this man-made famine.” As of late June this year, Palestinian officials reported just 26 aid trucks entering Gaza in the first five days of the month against a planned rate of roughly 300 a day, describing conditions as a “silent famine.”
Occupied land, a sanctioned minister’s police force
The November itinerary Declassified obtained included the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel has occupied and annexed in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 497, which declared the annexation “null and void” in 1981. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office maintains that “the Golan Heights are occupied territory and we do not recognise Israel’s annexation of them.” The delegation was also taken to Israel’s national police headquarters, an institution overseen by national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom Britain sanctioned in June last year for “repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian civilians.” Andy Kalil, who organised a 119,160-signature parliamentary petition calling for scrutiny of this funding, put it plainly: “Delegates were shown sites highlighting Israel’s security concerns, but not the devastation in Gaza. That’s not a balanced fact-finding visit.”
When MPs debated Kalil’s petition in Westminster Hall on 22 June, Tice did not address the funding. He called the debate itself “antisemitic in its very motivation and at its core.” That is the pattern here: scrutiny of a foreign government’s chequebook gets rebranded as prejudice, while the famine gets rebranded as a lie.
Same lobby, different rosette
Reform Friends of Israel was set up by Jason Pearlman, who was international media advisor to President Herzog until December while simultaneously working to fund the group, according to Middle East Eye. Pearlman held what he called “a dinner with Nigel and some key backers” to arrange “seed funding,” and has refused to name RFI’s donors. He told reporters RFI itself “did not and does not receive any funds from the Israeli or any other government,” a statement that is narrowly true and beside the point: the November trip was paid directly by the Israeli foreign ministry through Conexión Israel, a separate channel from the RFI-funded trip Tice took in September. Both funded the same outcome. Pearlman has also acknowledged that “some of the people who fund” Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel “will also be funding RFI.” Alan Mendoza, director of the Henry Jackson Society and president of the UK Jewish National Fund, now sits as Farage’s senior foreign-affairs adviser. Declassified has documented 56 such trips funded by Friends of Israel groups for British politicians in total. Reform is not being singled out for taking lobby money that Labour and the Conservatives have taken for years. It is being named for it, while it sells itself to voters as the one party that hasn’t been bought.
The pitch and the invoice
Reform’s entire offer to a bill-crushed, NHS-queuing, priced-out electorate is that it owes nothing to the old machine. Farage tells voters in Blackpool and Boston that Westminster’s establishment parties answer to donors, not to them. Yet the party’s deputy leader flew to Israel on a lobby group’s money, its chairman toured occupied territory and a sanctioned minister’s police force on the foreign ministry’s money, and its deputy leader then went on record denying a famine that the World Health Organisation had already confirmed. A party cannot claim to be untouched by the lobby while its leadership’s flights, hotels and briefings are paid for by it.
Atef Abu Khater did not get a six-day tour, an “enlightenment ideals” quote, or a foreign ministry invoice with his name on it. He got a father who watched him shrink to twenty-five kilos and could not stop it.
