US Has Sent Record $18B in Military Aid to Israel in Past Year — at a Minimum

As Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza and now threatens to unleash its aggression across the Middle East, the U.S. has sent Israeli forces a record $17.9 billion in military assistance, a new report released on the one-year mark of the genocide finds.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War, this is the highest amount of military aid sent to Israel in a year since the U.S. began the practice in 1959. Including the amount spent on U.S. operations related to Israel’s genocide and aggression, like operations against Houthis in Yemen, the U.S. has spent at least $22.7 billion since last year, the report finds.

This staggering figure represents only part of the total amount of assistance the U.S. has sent to support Israel’s attacks since October 7, 2023.

The $17.9 billion figure is derived from the $14.1 billion in military aid sent to Israel in April by Congress and the White House, on top of the annual $3.8 billion that the U.S. sends to Israel. However, the report authors note that there is a huge deficit in accounting because of the extreme opacity officials are maintaining around the shipments, unlike the detailed accounting of shipments to Ukraine, for instance.

In other words, though the total amount sent to Israel is astoundingly high and widely opposed by the public, U.S. officials are keeping the true figure under lock and key. The $17.9 billion figure doesn’t account for the Biden administration’s at least 100 weapons shipments to Israel that fall under the reporting threshold for such transfers, per a Washington Post report from March, or the shipments that may have come after that.

There is also tens of billions of dollars of promised assistance and assistance that was seemingly already promised before Israel’s total destruction of Gaza. The report notes that there is roughly $23 billion worth of active military transfers and sales between the U.S. and Israel, while the U.S. has also authorized Israel to access a U.S. weapons stockpile in Israel that contained up to $4.4 billion worth of weapons before October 7 of last year.

These sales have massively benefited U.S. weapons contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics, as the report notes, which develop the fighter jets and bombs that Israel has been using to bomb Gaza, Lebanon and the occupied West Bank.

The amount of assistance is only slated to grow as Israel escalates its aggression in Lebanon; in fact, Israeli officials have said that their military campaigns are made possible by U.S. assistance. The Biden administration is now pushing a $20.3 billion weapons deal with Israel. Though there is some pushback against the deal, Congress is likely to pass the package, providing Israel with a humongous tranche of weapons to bolster its military for years to come.

The genocide and related military activities are economically costly to the U.S. and the world. According to Costs of War, shipping costs have risen, costing the maritime trade an estimated $2.1 billion — costs that may be getting passed down to American consumers.