Ex-official was ordered to make UK arms report look ‘less bad’, Gaza tribunal hears

A former British foreign office official who resigned over Israel’s war on Gaza was ordered to alter a document he was authoring on UK arms sales to make it look “less bad”, he told an inquiry into Britain’s role in Israeli war crimes on Friday. 

Mark Smith joined the final day of The Gaza Tribunal, an unofficial two-day inquiry led by former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, via audio link to share his testimony. 

Smith was previously the penholder of a report that assessed whether the UK government was legally compliant in its arms exports to countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

It is unclear which specific countries Smith was reporting on or the timeframe of when he authored the report.

“While I was working on the report, I was routinely asked to change the report. This was not to correct mistakes or to ensure accuracy, as would normally be the case with a civil service report. But I was actually asked to alter the wording,” Smith said. 

“I was asked to change the placement of the paragraphs and to omit the information so that it sounded less bad.”

He said that in sections where he wrote about civilian casualties, he was asked to “clean them down, make them smaller”. 

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