Times of Israel
Who are Israel’s key weapons suppliers, and who has halted exports since Oct. 7?
Billions of dollars of munitions still coming from
US despite partial halt; since beginning of year, German weapon exports
have slowed, while Italy has stopped fresh approvals
Washington has suspended a shipment of heavy, bunker-busting bombs to
Israel, weapons Israeli forces have used in their war against Hamas
terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
US President Joe Biden also publicly warned Israel for the first time, in a CNN interview
on May 8 that the United States would withhold arms supplies if Israeli
forces carried out a threatened assault on the Gaza city of Rafah,
given this could endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of
displaced civilians there.
The war erupted on October 7 when the terror group launched its
devastating onslaught on southern communities, murdering 1,200 people,
mostly civilians, and taking 252 hostages back to the enclave.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says nearly 35,000 people in the
Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be
independently verified and includes some 15,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says
it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000
terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Two hundred and seventy-one soldiers have been killed during the
ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza
border.
The US has long been by far the largest arms supplier to its closest
Middle East ally, followed by Germany — whose strong support for Israel
reflects in part atonement for the Nazi Holocaust — and Italy.
Two countries, Canada and the Netherlands, have halted arms shipments
to Israel this year over concerns they could be used in ways violating
international humanitarian law — causing civilian casualties and
destruction of residential areas — in Gaza.
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Thick, black smoke rises from a fire in a
building caused by Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza
Strip on May 10, 2024. (AFP)
Israel says it does not target civilians and that the operation is
focused on eliminating Hamas. It has provided overwhelming evidence that
Hamas embeds itself among the civilian population and uses civilian
infrastructure to store its weapons.
Following are some details of Israel’s weapons suppliers.
United States
The suspended arms delivery to Israel consisted of 1,800 2,000-pound
(907-kg) bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs worth tens of millions of
dollars, according to US officials. The decision arose from concerns
about the “end-use of the 2,000-pound bombs and the impact they could
have in dense urban settings (like Rafah)…,” one US official said.
However, billions of dollars worth of US arms remain in the pipeline
for Israel, including tank rounds and kits that convert dumb bombs into
precision weapons, although the approval process has slowed, Senator Jim
Risch, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said
on May 9.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stopped short of concluding
in a pending, highly critical report to Congress on Israel’s conduct in
Gaza that it has violated the terms for its use of US weapons, Axios reported on May 9.
In 2016, the US and Israel signed a third 10-year Memorandum of
Understanding covering the 2018-2028 period providing $38 billion in
military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment, and $5
billion for missile defense systems. Israel received 69 percent of its
military aid from the US in the 2019-2023 period, according to a March
fact sheet issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI).
Israel is the first international operator of the US F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, deemed the most technologically advanced fighter jet
ever made, and had taken delivery of 36 of 75 F-35s on order as of last
year, paying for them with US assistance.
The US has also helped Israel develop its Iron Dome short-range
rocket defense system, developed after the 2006 war between Israel and
the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy Hezbollah. The US has repeatedly sent
Israel hundreds of millions of dollars to help replenish the system’s
interceptor missiles.
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File: A boy rides a donkey near one of the
batteries of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system at a village not
recognized by Israeli authorities in the southern Negev desert on April
14, 2024. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
Washington has helped fund the development of Israel’s “David’s
Sling” system, designed to shoot down rockets fired from distances of
100 km to 200 km (62 miles to 124 miles) away.
Germany
German defense export approvals for Israel rose nearly tenfold to
326.5 million euros ($351 million) in 2023 compared with 2022 as Berlin
treated permit requests as a priority after Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
However, since the start of this year, as international criticism of
Israel’s war in Gaza mounted, the German government appears to have
approved considerably fewer exports of war weapons to Israel. Deliveries
worth just 32,449 euros have so far been allowed, the economics
ministry said on April 10 in response to a query in parliament from a
left-wing lawmaker.
Germany primarily supplies Israel with components for air defense
systems and communications equipment, according to the German press
agency dpa, which first reported the 2023 figures.
Weapons exported included 3,000 portable anti-tank weapons and
500,000 rounds of ammunition for automatic or semi-automatic firearms.
Germany provided about 30% of Israel’s military aid in 2019-23,
according to SIPRI figures.
Italy
A Foreign Ministry source confirmed on May 9 that Italy had halted
new export approvals since the start of the Gaza war. “Everything
stopped. And the last orders were delivered in November,” the source
told Reuters.
Under Italian law, arms exports are banned to countries that are
waging war and those deemed to be violating international human rights.
In March, Defense Minister Guido Crosetto had said Italy has
continued to export arms to Israel but that only previously signed
orders were being honored after checks had been made to ensure the
weaponry would not be used against Gaza civilians.
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File: Italy’s Defense Minister Guido
Crosetto in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, Sept. 16, 2023. (AP
Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
In December alone, Italy sent 1.3 million euros worth of arms to Israel, triple the level of the same month in 2022.
Italy provided 0.9% of Israel’s imported arms in 2019-23, according
to SIPRI’s report, reportedly including helicopters and naval artillery.
Britain
Britain is not one of Israel’s biggest suppliers. Unlike the US,
Britain’s government does not give arms directly to Israel but rather
licenses companies to sell – often components into US supply chains,
such as for F-35 jets.
Last year, Britain granted export licenses to sell at least 42
million pounds ($52.5 million) of defense equipment to Israel — mainly
munitions, unmanned air vehicles, small arms ammunition, and components
for aircraft, helicopters and assault rifles.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told parliament on Thursday that Britain
ran one of the world’s strictest licensing control regimes in which it
periodically reviewed advice on Israel’s commitment to humanitarian law.
“With regard to export licenses, following the most recent assessment,
it is unchanged,” he said.
Some left-wing opposition parties have called on the government to
revoke the export licenses in the face of Gaza’s soaring death toll and
to publish the legal advice used to reach the assessment that arms
exports could continue.
