The Foreign Office unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza and more recently Lebanon has been closed because of cuts within the department, the Guardian can reveal.

The decision to shut the international humanitarian law cell follows a review by Olly Robbins, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office dismissed last week by the prime minister over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

The unit’s closure comes only a fortnight after the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said respect and support for international law would be one of the linchpins of her department under her leadership in her major annual set piece foreign policy speech.

The decision also means funding for the Conflict and Security Monitoring Project run by the Centre for information Resilience (CIR) will end. The centre had been doing a range of work for the Foreign Office, including the world’s largest open-source monitoring of incidents across Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.

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