2/25/26
When Israeli Arms Merchants Boast of Gaza Serving as a Lab for Human Testing -
Last week, I happened to disrupt a festival of blood. I struggle to find a different way to describe it. It was in a small pavilion at Expo Tel Aviv, where several hundred people had gathered for Defense Tech Expo Israel 2026 – the largest such exhibition in the country since October 7 and the war of annihilation in the Gaza Strip.
I had found the advertisement on a business news website. Among other things, it promised (in English) that the exhibition would feature "combat-proven technologies that shaped the recent conflict" – clinical circumlocution that frames the fighting as a professional accomplishment, devoid of context. What the English tech-speak of "field-tested" and "innovation under fire" means is simple: These are systems that were tested in a very real situation in which hundreds of people were killed in a single day, adding up to tens of thousands in two years. And this is presented as a marketing advantage, as if they were selling a Korean firming cream or a microwave oven that heats food in half the time of other models.
In other words, the manufacturers who display their wares here boast openly and shamelessly that Gaza is the twisted laboratory that enables them to earn more; that they are arms dealers who are profiting from the war and that the only numbers they care about are their company's market capitalization. The conference organizers do not present the verified death toll in Gaza – which as of October 2025 stood at 68,844 according to the Palestinian health ministry in the Strip, including 1,054 infants 12 months or younger, a number Israel no longer disputes – as a difficulty worth discussing. What did they present as a challenge? "The TikTok Threat – Social Media," as one of the sessions was pitched in the ad. It focused, presumably, on videos of civilians, sometimes entire families, being wiped out with the aid of these innovative technologies.
There was nothing in the advertisement about the failures of those systems during the trial-and-error phase, nor about the ethics of using artificial intelligence technologies, which reduce human involvement in decision-making and lead to the killing of noncombatants.
At the entrance to the conference hall, businesspeople, Israeli generals and delegations from around the world waited patiently; the opening ceremony , featuring remarks by figures including Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Adm. Giampaolo Di Paola, a former Italian defense minister and current president of an Italian defense manufacturer, had already begun. The vast majority of the attendees were Israelis – those who came to sell and those who came to learn what other companies are selling. According to reports, the large foreign procurement delegations that had characterized previous exhibitions were thinner on the ground this time.
It's a little unpleasant to shop in public, presumably, but that doesn't mean there are no buyers: According to the figures of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israeli arms sales have surged by more than 18 percent in the past two years. At the end of 2024, orders from Israel's defense industry amounted to $68.4 billion, 38 percent more than in 2023.
The Defense Ministry announced last year that Israel's all-time defense export record has been broken for the fourth consecutive year, with over $14.7 billion in 2024 – a 13 percent increase over the previous year.
This gap – between a reality of ongoing violence and an endless cycle of bloodshed on one side and the language of innovation, growth and opportunity – is nauseating. We, a small activist group, went to the conference and the exhibition in order to highlight this gap. When we held up signs accusing the visitors of supporting and participating in war crimes, and images of children who had been killed by the innovative technologies they came to examine – the participants seemed surprised. Genocide? Dead children? Blood economy? What does it have to do with them? That's not who they are.
In fact, the conference even featured a session titled "Women at the Forefront of Security Innovation: Between Vision, Power and Global Influence." One of the speakers was the CEO and co-founder of Smart Shooter, which develops and manufactures smart gunsights. According to reports, the company reported revenue of $20.8 million in the first nine months of 2025, a 241-percent increase compared to the same period in 2024. Indeed, a feminist achievement we can all take pride in, a celebration worthy of International Women's Day, March 8.
It was Opposite World, topsy-turvy. Arms dealers who made a fortune from the bodies that piled up and who apparently didn't particularly excel in protecting Israelis during the October 7 massacre are supposed to be cast out from society. Instead, they permit themselves to continue their trade festival, brazenly, while boasting about weapons that were tested in the course of a genocide.
Many of the attendees seemed not to understand what the problem was. Some put in their two cents in about those "crazy women" who don't understand anything about life. "This is how the world works, everyone needs weapons," one shouted at me.
Those who profit from the killing – but also those who simply do not want to confront the horrifying reality – prefer to portray those who refuse to remain silent as delusional. One participant, who tried to persuade me to end the disturbance we caused, explained that the attendees were "only doing their jobs," and that she herself was actually against the war.
But our goal was not to convince the people inside; those who benefit from the system will not volunteer to challenge it. We came to the conference and the exhibition in order to break the silent consensus which sees this as something normal. Ignoring it grants public legitimacy to such a conference and its participants, including academics, as if it were just another routine, neutral professional event.
We must speak the truth as it is: Nothing about this is routine or neutral. We have a responsibility as a society to act against the normalization of the killing in Gaza, not to pretend that it is an innovation devoid of context and not to allow the war profiteers to enjoy a public status free from criticism.
Sapir Slutzker Imran is a human rights lawyer, social activist and a doctoral candidate in law at Bar-Ilan University.