{"id":54194,"date":"2023-12-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-14T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.declassifieduk.org\/?p=54194"},"modified":"2024-05-16T16:11:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T15:11:19","slug":"how-one-british-business-could-stop-israeli-jets-bombing-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.declassifieduk.org\/how-one-british-business-could-stop-israeli-jets-bombing-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"How One British Business Could Stop Israeli Jets Bombing Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Ten miles away from Heathrow airport, slotted between a golf club and the M25, lies a family business that\u2019s been running for almost a century. In many ways, Martin-Baker is a British engineering success story, making \u00a372m profit last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its speciality, ejection seats, can be found in the cockpits of most Western fighter jets, serviced by a thousand staff at sites across the world. \u201cThe sun never sets on Martin-Baker,\u201d its website muses, in a nod to the former British Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside the company’s HQ in Buckinghamshire, an electronic screen keeps a tally of how many pilots have safely ejected from its seats. \u201cLives saved to date: 7715\u201d, it boasts. Yet less well publicised is how many lives the company is likely to have endangered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That question is particularly poignant now, because the company supplies seats to Israel\u2019s air force, which is pummeling Gaza with genocidal intensity. Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy, who studied at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, says the air force has hit more than 22,000<\/a> targets in the narrow coastal strip \u2013 exceeding the number America used in an entire year of operations in Afghanistan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More than 10,000 children have died in Israel\u2019s bombardment, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a rate without precedent in modern warfare. The frequency of such sorties means the aircraft involved are guzzling through inventories of spare parts, as engineers race to service the jets that are more complex than F1 cars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The jewel in the crown of Israel\u2019s air force are several dozen state-of-the-art F-35s, made by US arms giant Lockheed Martin and a myriad of subcontractors. Crucial to their continued operation will be the ejection seats with their explosive cartridges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n