How the UK Kept Selling Arms After Yemen Massacre
- Middle East Eye
- Mar 28
- 26 min read
Revealed: How the UK continued selling arms after Yemen massacreBy Dania Akkad with Anna Stavrianakis
We spent three years trying to find out what happened in Whitehall after the Great Hall attack in Yemen. We discovered how decisions fly with political winds, not facts on the ground - just as in Gaza
It all began with a simple question.
How did British officials react after Saudi Arabia killed 155 people and wounded hundreds more at a funeral in Yemen in 2016?
At the time, Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis was at its height, and would not have been possible without British weaponry.
Hundreds of mourners had gathered on Saturday 8 October 2016 at the Great Hall in Sanaa to pay their respects to the father of Jalal al-Ruweishan, interior minister of the rebel government.
One witness said: "A plane fired a missile and minutes later another plane pounded the building.
The attack was what is known as a “double tap”, where a first strike is followed by a second that kills additional civilians and emergency workers who have rushed to help the dead and injured. There were also witnesses who said there was a third strike that afternoon.Reports at the time spoke of the hall strewn with body parts and charred remains. Survivors had had limbs torn off. “The place has been turned into a lake of blood,” one rescuer told reporters.
The Great Hall attack, the biggest single loss of life during the war, was widely condemned internationally, by among others, the UN. Saudi Arabia eventually said it had carried out the air strike based on incorrect information. The massacre prompted the US administration under President Barack Obama to review its engagement in the conflict.
Two months later, Washington blocked a major weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, with officials pointing specifically to the funeral attack.But what about the UK? What happened when British civil servants and politicians returned to their desks in London the following Monday?
Did they reflect on whether this was the moment when British weapons should no longer be licensed for sale to Saudi Arabia?
After all, in February 2016, eight months before the attack, Edward Bell, the senior UK official overseeing arms export controls, told then-business secretary, Sajid Javid, that it would be “prudent and cautious” for the UK to halt weapons exports to Saudi Arabia. “My gut tells me we should suspend,” Bell wrote in an email.
But in November 2016, only weeks after the Great Hall attack, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary at the time, had urged Javid to continue selling arms, a Freedom of Information request would later show.
What had unfolded in Whitehall that October?
This is the story of what happened over three years as we brought our joint experience as an investigative journalist and an academic researching arms exports to try to answer this question.
Along the way, Israel’s offensive on Gaza - and the continued licensing of UK arms exports to Israel month after month as the Palestinian death toll rose - made finding an answer feel all the more urgent.
If we could shine light on what had happened with British arms exports during Yemen, could that help prevent it from happening again?
A long game
It was a Tuesday in March 2022 when this search began.
Somewhere, I figured, there had to be a paper trail, perhaps messages between civil servants, meeting notes or other documents hinting at what had unfolded in Whitehall back in autumn 2016.
It wasn’t going to be the easiest or quickest mystery to solve. But it also wouldn't be dangerous like the work of the Yemeni human rights organisation Mwatana which has documented violations of international humanitarian law on the ground, including the Great Hall attack.
From desks in London, we could get at the decisions that had taken lives in Yemen - and it mattered.
It was important for the British public to know exactly what was being done in their name, and above all, for Yemenis who had been targeted by weapons made in the UK.
I knew Anna Stavrianakis had done this successfully before: as a professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, she has extensively researched and taught about the international arms trade and arms transfer controls, and engaged with policymakers and NGOs about UK arms exports.
And most importantly, as far as I saw it, Anna knew her way around Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, which can be made by anyone in the UK to public authorities for information they hold.
After a 20-month fight with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), an FOI request Anna had made in 2017 turned up a set of emails that showed how Boris Johnson recommended the UK continue to sell bomb parts to Saudi Arabia - only days after an air strike on a Sanaa potato chip factory killed 14 people in August 2016.
I emailed Anna asking if there was a way to find out what had happened that October during government decision-making on arms exports, and why there seemed to be a hole in the official record.
“How interesting,” Anna wrote back less than a half hour later. “I'd be very happy to talk with you. Give me a bit of time to look through my FOI files etc - would Thursday work, say 10am?”
A week and a Signal call later, we were filing FOIs.
Paper promises: UK arms exports
The UK government frequently says it has one of the most robust arms export licensing regimes in the world, and that is true - on paper.
The policy is clear: the government will not allow arms exports when there is a clear risk they might be used in serious violation of international humanitarian law.
But a good policy on paper is not the same as a good policy in practice. Experts like Anna say the terms “clear” and “might” have been abused beyond any common sense meaning to allow ongoing exports.
Weapons are produced by privately-owned companies - BAE Systems is the UK’s largest arms company - but they must be licensed by the government for export. The licensing process is extremely opaque and often generates baffling outcomes.
For instance, during the Arab Spring of 2011, the government allowed the export of sniper rifles to North African and Middle Eastern states under the label of “crowd control goods”.
And while complex details of arms exports licensing policy may not capture the public imagination, MPs are not much better informed than those they represent.
Between 1999 and 2024, UK arms exports were scrutinised by a “super-committee” called the Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), to which four select committees - Business and Trade, Defence, Foreign Affairs and International Development - would each send members.
But CAEC was often beset by problems, including not having enough members present, the absence of a dedicated membership and chair, and being unable to convince relevant ministers to attend and give evidence.
In 2016, the committees held an inquiry into the use of UK-made arms during the war in Yemen. But it disintegrated into farce when members were split between those who wanted to recommend a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and those who did not. A draft of the report was leaked, and three of the separate committees ended up publishing their individual reports (only Defence chose not to).
Eventually, committee members themselves said that the running of the body was not conducive to the scrutiny of the government’s licensing and control of arms exports.
In January 2023, the chairs of the four select committees lobbied for the discussion of arms exports to get its own committee.
But Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt, then leader of the House of Commons and a former committee member herself, told them: “I appreciate the importance of effective parliamentary scrutiny of arms exports, however, I am currently not convinced that the change you have requested is needed.”
So no select committee. Instead, things went in the opposite direction: the under-performing CAEC was disbanded in January 2024, leaving arms control scrutiny to the Business and Trade Committee.
The result? After a strong start in which the committee challenged the government about its performance on scrutiny, Labour’s success in the general election of July 2024 muted the committee’s performance.
Details about arms export policy only emerge when MPs, campaigners, journalists and researchers overcome government delay and obstruction and seek them out, or when legal challenges force the government to reveal its hand.
Indeed, most of the public details about UK government decisions relating to arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the Yemen war only came from government submissions to the High Court in 2017, when the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) brought a legal challenge.
But even then, many of the government's submissions were not released publicly. Instead, they were only shared during closed evidence hearings that only CAAT’s specially appointed lawyers were allowed to attend on the grounds of national security.
Even CAAT wasn’t sure what was public and what was private: indeed, it had to check with its lawyer when Anna and I asked if the group had any other records relating to the Great Hall attack that they had not put on their website.
There was also the problem of figuring out what other people had already requested through their own FOIs. Some government departments and authorities post these online - but not all.
There is no single exhaustive collection of FOIs in the UK, although groups such as Unredacted, a research unit at the University of Westminster, are attempting to coordinate efforts and plug the gap.
The unit’s Yemen War Project, which hosts the largest collection of publicly available material related to UK involvement in the war in Yemen since 2015, will launch with the publication of this story. All of the FOIs we mention in this story can now be viewed in the project’s archive.
Now, back to our hunt.
Anna had trawled through the documents she had already received in response to her requests. I looked through What Do They Know, a website where many people voluntarily post their FOI requests and answers in an attempt to keep the information public.
But nothing was turning up to fill in the gaps.
And our requests were being kicked down the road by government departments, one stock email at a time.
Making the call on Saudi Arabia
What exactly were we looking for?
It was obvious to almost everyone that the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, had violated international humanitarian law (IHL) in Yemen. Civilian spaces from schools to hospitals to market places and beyond had been hit long before the funeral hall was double-tapped.
The FCDO is responsible for those parts of the arms licensing process that relate to IHL.
But how had the ministry’s officials and lawyers measured Saudi Arabia’s capacity and commitment to following international law? And what had the politicians they advised done with that advice?
To get down to specifics: had British ministers and their advisers decided that the October 2016 attack was the final straw as to whether there was a clear risk that British weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia might be used to violate IHL?
If they did then the UK government, by its own criteria, should have stopped licensing arms exports to Saudi Arabia.
We suspected that among the government documents coming back to us would be a metaphorical smoking gun, tucked somewhere between all the redactions.
It would reveal, we theorised, how officials believed the clear risk threshold had been met - but that the government had sat on the advice so that they would not have to restrict arms exports.
In essence, we were trying to go back and publicly mark the government’s homework in the belief that, if we could expose what we suspected had happened, then it just might stop it happening again.
But then Israel’s war on Gaza would completely upend our logic.
Requests, redactions and delay
Even before the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 that precipitated Israel’s war on Gaza - which, once again raised major questions about UK arms exports policy - the responses we got to our FOIs made us realise this mystery would not be solved quickly or cleanly.
It’s at this point that this story gets a bit more complicated - but I promise you it is going somewhere (although you may want to go make a coffee).
Here’s the overview: between March 2022 and April 2024, Anna and I separately filed 15 different FOI requests with the FCDO and the Department for International Trade (DIT), as it was called then.
We wanted correspondence between key government officials about UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia after the Great Hall attack.
Anna had already successfully, if painfully, used FOIs to find information about the advice officials gave politicians in the three months before the air strike. It took her 20 months and an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office to force the information out of the Foreign Office.
So we followed her tried-and-tested approach, initially requesting information from both the foreign and trade departments about the quarterly reporting period of October to December 2016, as well as trying other angles.
Some of our requests were rejected on the basis that they were “too broad” or “too expensive”: in other words, that it would cost more than 24 hours of staff time, valued at £600 (about $780) to retrieve what we wanted.
Fair enough. We weren’t out to bankrupt or overwork the British government. We just wanted information.
But Anna’s previous effort had not initially been rejected for being too broad or too expensive - the FCO had refused to release information on the grounds that it would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs or potentially damage the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, we refiled those requests, specifying narrower time frames in the hope of being successful.
The third time that one of my narrower Foreign Office requests was rejected, the ministry’s FOI unit explained that the material I wanted was “located across a significant volume of physical folders and loose papers which would also contain information that is not relevant to your request”.
They acknowledged that I had been shortening my time frames, which in theory would have meant less work for them, but still said they had “no way of easily identifying the information” because of this apparent loose paper situation.
“We are unable to offer any viable suggestions on how your request could be narrowed in a way that would enable us to comply with it,” they concluded.
So I filed for an internal review after this third request: the FOI equivalent of ordering a well-done steak at a restaurant and then calling over the manager to complain that it’s under-cooked.
In January 2023, I was told that the FCDO manager, in this case, agreed with the staff: what I had asked for was too expensive to process.
That was the Foreign Office - but the team over at the trade department responded slightly differently.
After rejecting my first request over cost, the DIT then said in August 2022 that my second request had triggered what is called a “public interest test”, which is a common response, especially on anything foreign policy or security-related.
What was more in the public’s interest - disclosing the information I wanted or withholding it? Whatever it was, they’d need more time to consider.
Another month passed and the department extended their deadline again. I requested an internal review.
The next month, the department rejected the FOI request citing three exemptions. If released, the information I wanted might:
harm the UK’s international relations
reveal how government policy is developed
prejudice an individual, a company, or the government’s interests
But six months later, the same department’s internal review flagged that they had made a mistake. This wasn’t about exemptions: actually, as with the Foreign Office, I had asked for too much and it was too expensive.
I was welcome to try again, the DIT said - and unlike the Foreign Office, they made some suggestions. But, by the way, they might still reject that request based on some of the same exemptions they had initially cited.
“Other exemptions may apply,” they added.
I tried again.
Now, the government has a web-based licensing export system called Spire. Among other suggestions, they wondered: would the specific information I needed be on that? Or was it of a more general nature, like correspondence outside of Spire?
So between January and June 2023, I filed another three FOI requests with the DIT based on their guidance.
My first two requests were for any correspondence outside of Spire and then specifically for correspondence held in electronic format outside of Spire. For both, the department said it had nothing.
The third request, though, was for documents on Spire – and they actually found something that fell under my request. But again they refused to release it because they said this might:
prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs and commercial interests
reveal personal information or information shared in confidence
And then, as all seemed lost, a separate FOI query Anna had made to the trade ministry looked like it would deliver the much-needed breakthrough.
Four months to say it will take three days
When it comes to licensing arms exports, the UK government considers a list of eight criteria.Criterion 2, as it is known, specifically looks at how much the buyer - here Saudi Arabia - respects international humanitarian law.So Anna asked for information about occasions when trade or foreign office officials had raised Criterion 2 concerns about arms exports to Riyadh.Her request yielded a handful of dates - good start, we thought. But none of the dates matched with the Great Hall attack or the days immediately following. The trade department reminded her that it was the FCDO providing advice on Criteria 2: “You might like to contact them,” they told Anna.
But the department refused to release any information about the nature of the concerns, or an email chain between then-trade secretary Liam Fox and then-trade minister Mark Garnier from December 2016 that DIT had told Anna they held.
So Anna requested an internal review of this denial of release of information and then went to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the final arbiter of all FOI disputes. Both times, the denial of information was upheld.
Next: back to the Foreign Office (it’s now February 2023).
After two earlier rejections based on cost, Anna’s third request drew the suggestion that we “consider requesting information held in electronic format on the FCDO’s centrally managed IT system”.
So Anna did. The FCDO eventually released some basic information about the number of assessments that it had made of Saudi Arabia. It included that officials had conducted Criterion 2 assessments on several dates including, crucially, 12 October - only four days after the Great Hall attack.
But, the department said, it did not hold any records indicating that the FCDO had raised concerns about Criterion 2 with other departments.
Nor had it done so via the interdepartmental Export Control Joint Unit, a cross-departmental body that oversees UK export controls and licensing for military and dual-use items.
Ministers had been consulted only once, on 19 October 2016.
Anna then went more specific. In June 2023 she requested documents and information about the Great Hall strike which had been referred to in media reports and court documents but not released publicly in full.
These included a letter from Boris Johnson to Liam Fox dated 8 November 2016; an IHL update received by Johnson, which he mentioned recently receiving in that letter; and other material, including UK requests to Saudi Arabia for changes to targeting after the Great Hall strikeThere was also a decision paper from 2019, advising the government about international humanitarian law issues, including an overall assessment of Saudi Arabia’s actions in relation to Criterion 2.
For four months the FCDO failed to reply, despite Anna chasing them up. It then sent her a holding message. So she went to the ICO, who told the FCDO to hurry up.
At the end of October 2023, the Foreign Office finally told Anna the request was too expensive: it had taken them four-and-a-half months to decide that responding would take more than three-and-a-half working days.
Anna requested an internal review. In January 2024, the FCDO released a redacted version of the 2019 "decision paper" that had already been discussed in court, citing national security exemptions. But it still didn’t answer the other questions we had.
At the same time, in October 2023, Anna had complained again to the ICO. It took the ICO until April 2024 to allocate a case worker. The FCDO failed to respond to their investigation within three months and then delayed access to the withheld material.
Further delays and missed deadlines ensued “due to the intricacies of this particular case,” according to the ICO.
One factor in this was the apparent requirement for ICO officials to physically go to the FCDO to view the withheld material, raising the question of what format it is held in.
Having missed their own 12-month deadline for complex cases, the ICO issued a decision notice the day before this story was published.
They upheld the FCDO's decision but required them to advise how to refine it; and required the FCDO to release the same version of the 2019 Decision Paper as has already been made public by CAAT.
David Cameron and the Gaza coverup
We felt like we were reaching the end of the road.
But there remained one final option: we could ask for any information about ourselves that had been generated by the departments when they looked at our requests over the past few years.
Known as “subject access requests”, these have sometimes offered a behind-the-curtain view on government decision-making when more traditional means have failed.
Example: in 2019, documents released under such a request showed how the Ministry of Justice scrambled to halt further coverage of a report, leaked to then-Buzzfeed journalist Emily Dugan, that included testimonies from judges and prosecutors about the rising number of people facing criminal charges without a lawyer.
“Avoid talking to Emily Dugan on the phone in any more detail than is absolutely necessary,” the MoJ’s press office told its staff in internal documents.
And last year, Bahraini activist Sayed Alwadaei learned through a subject access request that the Foreign Office had attempted to block the Home Office from granting him citizenship, even though he met all of the legal requirements, as it could impact UK-Bahrain relations.
So we filed requests to investigate how our own investigation had been received. And again, we waited.
By now it was late 2023. Israel’s war on Gaza was unfolding and we were feeling an eerie sense of repetition.
Civilian infrastructure was being hit and and civilians in Gaza were being killed in Israeli air strikes that might be using UK-made arms.
MPs wanted to know: what was the Foreign Office’s assessment?
In January 2024, newly appointed Foreign Secretary David Cameron was pressed before the Foreign Affairs Committee about whether he had been advised that Israel had breached international humanitarian law.
Cameron, who noted repeatedly that he wasn’t a lawyer, eventually said: “The short answer to that is no.”
But 10 days later, the Business and Trade department was forced to file court documents after Palestinian rights group Al-Haq mounted a legal challenge against UK arms exports to Israel.
The documents revealed that as early as 10 November 2023, one month after the war began, Foreign Office officials had indeed been raising concerns about Israel’s compliance.
In the weeks that followed, Conservative MP Alicia Kearnes, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a former Foreign Office official herself, was recorded telling Tory donors at a drinks reception that the government had indeed received advice from its own lawyers that Israel had breached IHL in Gaza but had failed to make it public. Making that assessment public would trigger a suspension of arms exports.
When asked about the recording, she didn’t deny what she’d said.
“I remain convinced the government has completed its updated assessment on whether Israel is demonstrating a commitment to international humanitarian law, and that it has concluded that Israel is not demonstrating this commitment,” Kearns told The Guardian.
Each time the curtain was briefly peeled back, Andrew Mitchell, the senior Foreign Office minister in the House of Commons, would face a flurry of questions from MPs to clarify what lawyers had found and when their findings would be made public (Cameron, as a lord, could not sit in the lower chamber).
Week after week, ministers obfuscated.
On 26 March 2024, by when at least 32,414 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza and Israel had been accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, then-shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, asked Mitchell if he could give “a simple yes or no answer” to one question: had the Foreign Office been advised that British weapons might be used to commit or facilitate war crimes?
Mitchell replied that the UK had “a robust arms export licensing regime” and that Israel's adherence to international humanitarian law was regularly reviewed and the government “act in accordance with that”. He said that the Foreign Office would not publish any legal advice.
Despite the court filings, leaks, and parliamentary questions, MPs and the public remained none the wiser about the Foreign Office’s assessments and whether the government was still licensing arms exports to Israel without restriction.
These questions became all the more critical after three British aid workers were killed in an Israeli drone attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza on 1 April 2024. Arms campaigners speculated that the military technology could have included UK-made engines.
This was, in fact, the second time during the war that British aid workers had been attacked by Israel, potentially with UK-made weapons.
Around 6am on 18 January 2024, an F-16 jet dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on a compound in al-Mawasi that was housing British doctors, among others, working for UK-based Medical Aid for Palestine and the US-based International Rescue Committee, headed by former UK foreign secretary, David Miliband.
Several staff and a bodyguard were injured and the compound severely damaged.
But a month earlier, the Israeli military had told the British defence attache in Tel Aviv that the site had been designated as a protected, humanitarian area. And four months later, the World Central Kitchen convoy was hit.
Would this fatal attack on its own citizens in Gaza, potentially with UK-made weapons, change the government’s position on arms export licensing?
It was only on 9 April 2024, in answer to a journalist’s question during a press conference in Washington, that Cameron, flanked by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, made it clear: there had been no change to the UK’s arms export policy towards Israel.
This seemed to fly in the face of logic and all of the publicly available information. It was hard to imagine that the updated legal advice had become any more confident about Israeli compliance with international humanitarian law.
Five months later, on 2 September 2024, the newly elected Labour government announced it was suspending around 30 licences for arms exports to Israel after a review found that there was indeed a clear risk that UK-made weapons might be used in violation of international humanitarian law.
That was news that got the headlines.
But it was a lower-profile story published the following day in The Guardian that really caught our attention.
Someone who helped draft Foreign Office advice said that politicians had been told seven months earlier that Israel was breaching international humanitarian law in Gaza. Cameron had sat on the advice.
The unnamed source pointed to a memorandum released the day before by the Labour government, explaining why it had suspended the arms exports and said the memo was “similar to what was being sent to the government from at least February onwards”.
“The tragedy has to be considered,” the source said. “How many lives might have been saved if the arms export licences had been stopped then and not in September, and what the potential ripple effect might have been on how other countries would have reacted in ceasing trade.”
The story lit up arms control and aid organisation WhatsApp groups.
But this key detail - that the advice from inside the Foreign Office had been roughly similar for seven months while more than 13,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza - faded from public attention as soon as it fell off the Guardian homepage.
What the government said about us
In the midst of all this, our subject access requests had started to come back in February 2024.
Anna’s file from the Trade Department was mostly a snapshot of her work with parliamentary committees and campaign groups.
The Foreign Office was a bit more wary: “...we need to look at this closely in the context of previous FOIs from Anna [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Anna successfully appealed an FOI response in 2019.”
They also described that in giving evidence to the Committees on Arms Export Controls, she had “dominated” the sessions and been “very critical of the Govt”.
Note that the FOI process is supposed to be “applicant blind”: officials are not supposed to take the identity of the individual requesting information into consideration, as FOI releases are about putting information into the wider public domain. And both FOI requests and subject access requests are supposed to be motive-blind: they are to be treated without reference to the applicant’s motives.
My request revealed a bit more. As, over the months, I whittled down the time frame of my requests, heavily redacted emails showed that the Foreign Office and Trade Department FOI units were in touch with each other.
“We have received a new [request for information] on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. The request is the same as the one we received in March but a narrower time frame,” someone in the Foreign Office whose name was redacted wrote to another person whose name was redacted in the DIT on 15 July 2022.
“We previously issued a section 12 attached due to the wider scope of the original request,” they wrote, referring to the disproportionate costs exemption.
Eight minutes later, someone in the DIT pinged back: “Yes, we received the same cut down request.”
And on 18 July 2022, someone in the Foreign Office emailed two contacts in the government legal department noting my latest FOI. “The requester has now written back with a new FOI request covering a narrower time frame,” they wrote.
The emails also showed that there had also been some discussion - maybe even tension - within the Foreign Office about how it should respond.
“It's unfortunate that the requester followed our refinement advice in the previous response and we're now saying that no refinement is possible…” one person wrote on an undated day.
In November 2022, someone asks in an email: “Are dept absolutely sure we could not ask requester to narrow any future request.”
Two months later, someone in the Foreign Office wrote: “I think that we really need to add in some guidance on how to narrow the request. If this were to lead to an ICO complaint they would comment on the lack of assistance provided to the requester.”
In response to that email, someone else said they had established that, regardless of the date range, they would apply the exemption that my request was too expensive because what had been requested was located across a large volume of physical folders and loose papers.
“There is an end-point to this type of activity and this appears to be it,” they wrote.
It was interesting to us that the kind of documentation we were requesting, such as correspondence between ministers and teams of Foreign Office and Trade Department made in 2016, would, in the age of email and text messaging, be stored in folders as loose papers.
But also, the idea that folders and papers were just sitting somewhere left us convinced that, if we just framed our request differently, then we could get something.
The Foreign Office wasn’t going to advise us on how to do this. But we might as well give it one last last shot.
The Great Hall coverup
In one final FOI in April 2024, I asked specifically for “read outs, agendas, notes, emails, handouts, reports or any other documentation related to any meetings held within the Foreign Office between 10 October 2016 and 14 October 2016 regarding the Saudi-led coalition bombing of a funeral hall in Sanaa on 8 October 2016”.
This was a final attempt to specify types of documentation associated with meetings we assume must have happened in the aftermath of the air strike.
This time, I got something.
In August 2024, a 10-page digest of heavily redacted emails sent between officials in the wake of the attack landed in my inbox. I couldn’t quite believe it at first. But then I started reading.
Even with the redacted passages, it was clear from the flurry of emails that, yes, British officials had been concerned on that Monday morning in October 2016, only two days after scores of Yemenis were massacred at a funeral.
There is, for example, reference several times to an office meeting that day, described in one email subject line as “Monday’s FS meeting on Yemen”, which suggests that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson attended.
Mentioned in the emails is a set of “asks of the Saudis” that came out of the meeting. These were to be communicated by then Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood during a trip to Riyadh that week.
The emails also detail that someone “will be taking the note”. There is also mention of a readout, presumably key points from that meeting.
Surely, we thought, this documentation would have fallen under our FOI requests, including one in which I had asked for minutes of any meetings which Johnson and Ellwood had both attended that October. But we’d never seen it.
On Wednesday 12 October, Neil Bush, head of the Arabian Peninsula and Iran Department sent an email to top Foreign Office officials involved in the Middle East, and UK ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, the US and the United Arab Emirates among others.
It noted that the latest assessment of Saudi Arabia’s compliance with international humanitarian law was completed the week before the Great Hall attack. Furthermore, it had been due to be delivered to Johnson’s private office by noon on Monday 10 October.
That update, Bush wrote, “concluded the clear risk threshold had not been reached, but the judgment was becoming increasingly finely balanced”.
Over the weekend of the air strike, he and others had discussed the funeral hall attack and the “implications for the clear risk test on IHL”.
He wrote: “The incident on 8th October at the funeral hall in Sana’a was an important new development that officials recommended needed to be taken into consideration in our assessment on IHL.”
Johnson, he said, had agreed and asked for all incidents up to the end of the weekend to be “incorporated into an updated assessment”.
That updated assessment was now being redrafted. “We are developing in tandem a handling plan as a prudential measure if the clear risk test is considered to be met,” Bush wrote.
This was crucial.We now knew that, even before the Great Hall attack, the question of whether Saudi Arabia was capable and committed to following international humanitarian law was already in question.
We also now knew that the attack had prompted a new – or updated – assessment. Civil servants had been concerned enough that the clear risk test might be met that they had prepared a handling - or fallback - plan.
But what still remained unclear was the outcome of that new assessment and how ministers had interpreted and used that advice. And it was also unclear what exactly had been redacted from all of the emails.
It was a question that became all the more pertinent when a whistleblower came forward in February 2025, saying he had watched the formulation of the UK arms export policy first-hand during the Yemen war and had resigned over it.
Writing in the Guardian, Mark Smith said that the UK government had ignored legal advice to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia during the war in Yemen.
Smith was a lead adviser on arms sales policy in the Foreign Office, and tasked with gathering information to inform advisers on whether sales were lawful.
He said that there had been a high-level meeting of senior Foreign Office officials, including legal advisers, in which it was “acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales”.
“Yet instead of advising ministers to suspend exports, the focus shifted to finding ways to ‘get back on the right side of the law’,” Smith wrote.
Smith didn’t say exactly when this high-level meeting happened and did not respond to my request, through an intermediary, to have a conversation in which he might say more.
He did, however, elaborate in his piece on the culture he observed inside the Foreign Office, saying that “officials are bullied into silence” to make arms trade rules that “create a facade of legitimacy, while allowing the most egregious crimes against humanity to take place”.
Smith said he was instructed to “rebalance” his findings, that his reports were edited, and that he was given verbal instructions that would be immune from prying FOI requests.
Officials who delivered dissenting advice were asked to seek “additional information” and reporting deadlines were extended. He said he saw this across both the Yemen and Gaza wars in relation to arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Once out of the world of arms export licensing, Smith was warned not to put his concerns in writing and to delete any and all correspondence.
What we learned after three years
Smith’s piece was a revelation for me and Anna, a seeming confirmation of why we had spent three years with so little to show for our efforts.
And it left us with a question: what had been redacted from the little information we had received; and what information and advice had never been put into writing in the first place?
I have since asked the Foreign Office whether it was true, as Smith said, that British officials had acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales. If that was the case, then was it a result of the Great Hall attack?
I also asked what the outcome was of the assessment ordered immediately after the Great Hall attack.
In answer, an FCDO spokesperson issued the boilerplate response that we’ve heard many times before: “Each export licence application is rigorously assessed on a case-by-case basis against the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria.
“We will not issue an export licence where to do so would be inconsistent with the Criteria, including when there is a clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
So after three years of searching, we’ve come to believe there is no smoking gun when it comes to the international humanitarian law assessments that inform the licensing of UK arms exports.
Not because there isn’t dissent within the state, but because any dissent is snuffed out by bureaucratic manoeuvring and political direction.
When there are those very rare smoking guns, such as Mark Smith’s damning testimony about the government ignoring advice during the Yemen war, they risk becoming damp squibs when it becomes clear how hard it is to hold individuals and the machinery of the state accountable.
Ironically, while Smith wanted to defend the ability of officials to “provide impartial advice without fear of political interference”, the government repeatedly uses the “free and frank advice” exemption to withhold information from the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
These are the actions of a government actively suppressing civil servants’ professional obligations and the public’s right to know.
And it’s not specific to this current government: we started our quest under a previous government, and the commitment to arms sales cuts across both Labour and the Conservatives, who governed from 2010 until July last year.
Instead, most of what the public has learned has continued to come from court cases and whistleblowers.
How did British officials react after the Saudi-led coalition killed 155 people and wounded at least 525 more who were attending a crowded funeral in Yemen on 8 October 2016?
The delay, denial, and deflection we have experienced lead us to conclude that the government deliberately circumvented the law to carry on selling weapons.
But we still can’t say for sure.
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