US spends annual record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel
The United States has spent a record total of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the country began its war on Gaza says a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project, according to the Arab News via AP.
$4.86 billion has also gone into US military operations in the region over the last year. That tally includes the costs of a Navy-led campaign in Yemen, where the Houthis are carrying attacks in solidarity with Hamas. The report is one of the first tallying US costs since the war began, and was compiled before Israel began its invasion of Lebanon.
The toll has of course not only been financial – 1,200 were killed in Israel a year ago on October 7th 2023, and Israel’s war on Gaza since then has killed nearly 42,000 people. In recent weeks Israel has also killed at least 1,4000 people in Lebanon, after stepping up their bombing campaign and eventually invading the country.
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Linda J. Blimes, a Harvard professor who has assessed the costs of US wars since the September 11th attacks, has been calculating the costs alongside researchers William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler.
The $17.9 billion spent over the last year, adjusted for inflation, is by a distance the most military aid sent to Israel in a single year. This aid has included military financing, arms sales, at least $4.4 billion in drawdowns from US stockpiles and hand-me-downs of used equipment.
The US committed to giving billions in military assistance to both Israel and Egypt annually in the 1979 US-brokered treaty between the two countries, and the Obama administration set the yearly amount for Israel at $3.8 billion through to 2028. Significant amounts of the US weapons delivered in the year were munitions, including artillery shells and 2,000-pound bunker-busters and precision-guided bombs.
READ: 41,788 Palestinians killed in Gaza war
While US military aid to Ukraine is publicly documented, it wasn’t possible to get full details of what the US has shipped to Israel in the last year, so the $17.9 figure is only partial, the researchers explained. They cited efforts by the Biden administration to “hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering.”
The figure of $4.86 billion spent on US military operations in the region does not included military aid given to Egypt and other US allies in the region. Last October 7th, the US had 34,000 forces in the Middle. By this August that number had risen to 50,000, while the total is now around 43,000.
AP
