Mustafa Barghouti: How Israel's War Machine Runs on Support From the US, India, and Europe ‎

Palestinian physician-politician Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and one of the most frequently interviewed Palestinian analysts in Western and Arab media, has repeatedly argued that Israel's military campaigns in Gaza and the wider Palestinian territories would be unsustainable without the steady flow of weapons, ammunition, and diplomatic cover it receives from a network of foreign allies chief among them the United States, but increasingly India and a cluster of European states as well.

The United States: The Backbone of Israel's Arsenal

Barghouti has been most pointed in his criticism of Washington's role. In one widely circulated interview, he argued that the Biden administration provided Israel with no less than $17.9 billion of military equipment, and more than 50,000 tons of explosives and weapons in the year following October 2023 a figure he says was used in the assault on Gaza.

That number aligns with independent tracking: Brown University's Costs of War project found that from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024, the US sent $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, the largest amount of military funding ever granted to Israel in a single year.

This is not a new pattern. According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States is the largest supplier of military equipment to Israel, accounting for approximately 69% of Israel's major conventional arms imports between 2019 and 2023, including advanced aircraft, precision-guided munitions, and missile defense systems such as the Iron Dome.

Since Israel's founding, it has received roughly $310 billion in inflation-adjusted total economic and military aid from the United States, making it the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid in history.

Barghouti's core argument is not simply about the volume of arms, but about political will. He has contended that Washington possesses real leverage over Israeli conduct but has consistently chosen not to use it, pointing to the presence of senior US officials including the Secretary of State, Defense Secretary, and National Security Advisor at Israeli war-cabinet meetings during the Gaza campaign as evidence of active, not passive, backing.

Bunker-Busters: The Clearest Example of Direct US Involvement

Nowhere is this dependency clearer than in Washington's repeated transfer of "bunker buster" munitions bombs designed to penetrate hardened, underground targets that Israel's own air force cannot deliver on its own.

During the Gaza war, the Wall Street Journal reported that Washington covertly transferred 100 BLU-109 bombs to Israel, alongside more than 5,000 unguided Mk82 bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 bombs, roughly 1,000 GBU-39 small-diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAM guidance kits that convert unguided bombs into precision-guided munitions. US officials said the transfers were not disclosed publicly at the time because of the mechanisms used to move the weapons.

This was not the first time such a transfer happened quietly. In 2009, the Obama administration secretly authorized the delivery of 55 GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs to Israel a deal first requested under the Bush administration in 2005 and initially refused over concerns about Israeli technology transfers to China. The bombs were seen at the time as potentially useful for a future Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

The pattern resurfaced dramatically in 2026, when the US itself dropped more than a dozen 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iran's Fordo and Natanz nuclear sites during Israel's 12-day war with Iran, since Israel lacks both the bomb and the aircraft capable of carrying it.

In the aftermath, bipartisan US lawmakers introduced legislation to give the president standing authority to transfer the GBU-57 and the aircraft needed to carry it directly to Israel, should Iran resume work toward a nuclear weapon a bill explicitly framed as preserving Israel's "qualitative military edge" in the region.

For Barghouti, this progression from covert 2,000-pound bombs used in Gaza to open legislative proposals to hand Israel the world's largest bunker-buster and the aircraft to deploy it is emblematic of his broader argument: that US support for Israel has moved from quiet backchannel assistance toward increasingly open and permanent military entrenchment, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress.

India: From Quiet Cold War Ties to a Leading Arms Client

Less discussed in Western coverage, but central to Barghouti's broader critique of "complicit" democracies, is India's transformation from a historic supporter of the Palestinian cause into one of Israel's most significant defense partners.

India once voted against the partition of Palestine at the UN in 1947 and became the first non-Arab country to recognize the PLO in 1974. Yet behind that diplomatic posture, India and Israel began an unofficial relationship in the 1960s and traded arms covertly throughout the Cold War.

That relationship has since gone fully public and deepened substantially. Indian defense analysts now describe it as a partnership that has moved beyond simple purchases into co-development and co-production of military technology.

The ideological affinity between India's current government and Israel's leadership has accelerated this shift, helping make India Israel's largest weapons market, with a 2017 deal involving Israel Aerospace Industries described at the time as the single largest contract in Israeli arms-export history.

The scale of this relationship became starkly visible during the Gaza war. An Al Jazeera investigation into customs and trade data found that India ranked as Israel's second-largest source of military-related imports during the war, accounting for about 26% of the total declared value behind only the United States, which accounted for more than 42%. Together, the two countries made up more than two-thirds of the total value of all arms imports recorded during that period.

Europe: Quiet Suppliers Behind the Public Debate

Barghouti has also directed criticism at European governments, arguing that public statements of concern over Gaza have not translated into a halt in material support.

European Union member states collectively accounted for nearly 19% of the total value of Israel's weapons-related imports during the war, with Israel reportedly importing military-related goods from six European countries despite existing arms restrictions.

Germany stands out as the largest of these. SIPRI data shows Germany as the second-largest historical supplier of arms to Israel, accounting for about 30% of its arms imports between 2019 and 2023, including air defense components, ammunition, and weapons-development technology; a brief suspension of some German exports in 2024 was reportedly reversed later that year.

Italy and Canada also appear among recorded suppliers, providing naval artillery, fighter jets, military helicopters, and fighter jet engines.

Not all European governments have stayed the course, however Canada and the Netherlands both halted certain arms shipments to Israel over concerns the weapons could be used in ways that violate international humanitarian law.

A Wider Web of Suppliers
Barghouti's broader point that Israel's military dependence is diffused across dozens of governments rather than resting on the US alone is reflected in trade data showing at least 51 countries supplied Israel with military-related goods during the Gaza war, with smaller but notable volumes from Romania, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and several East and Southeast Asian nations including China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore.

The Other Side of the Argument
Israeli officials and many of these supplying governments reject the framing Barghouti applies, characterizing arms transfers as legitimate defense cooperation with a sovereign state facing security threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed groups, rather than as complicity in wrongdoing.

Governments such as the United States and Germany have generally maintained that their military relationships with Israel comply with international law and their own arms-export controls, even as individual shipments have periodically drawn legal and political scrutiny at home.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. (USIP)

[email protected]
+233555275880

Sources
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