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Arms Exports to Israel: Which Countries Supply Weapons, and the Legal Challenges

Since the Israeli military offensive in Gaza began in October 2023, the question of who supplies Israel’s weapons — and whether those suppliers bear legal responsibility for how those weapons are used — has moved from academic journals into international courtrooms. The answers, documented by arms-transfer researchers and tested by judges in The Hague and London, reveal a supply chain concentrated in a handful of Western states and a body of international law that, advocates argue, obliges those states to act.

Who Arms Israel: The SIPRI Picture

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), whose arms-transfer database is the most widely cited open-source record of major conventional weapons flows, provides the clearest statistical picture. According to SIPRI data covering the decade to 2023, the United States supplies roughly 69 percent of Israel’s major arms imports. Germany accounts for approximately 30 percent, a share that surged after Berlin approved a series of export licences in late 2023. Italy has historically been a more modest but consistent supplier, providing aircraft components, naval systems, and small arms. The United Kingdom, France, and Canada have also featured in the supply chain, though at lower volumes.

SIPRI’s figures cover “major conventional weapons” — aircraft, armoured vehicles, missiles, ships, and their engines and guidance systems — and do not capture ammunition, small arms, or the classified intelligence and targeting assistance that human rights organisations say form a significant part of Western military support to Israel. The real dependency, in other words, is likely deeper than the headline percentages suggest.

The Dutch F-35 Case: A Landmark February 2024 Ruling

The most consequential legal intervention came from the Netherlands. In November 2023, Oxfam Novib, Amnesty International Netherlands, Human Rights Watch, and the rights group PAX filed an emergency injunction before the District Court of The Hague, arguing that the Dutch government’s continued export of F-35 fighter-jet components to Israel — the Netherlands holds a key role in the joint strike fighter supply chain — violated Dutch and European export-control law.

On 12 February 2024, the Court of Appeal in The Hague upheld a lower-court order and ruled that the Netherlands must halt the export of F-35 parts to Israel within seven days. The court found a “clear risk” that the components would be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. The Dutch government had argued it conducted its own assessments and found no such clear risk; the appeals court disagreed, citing documented airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and the scale of civilian casualties recorded by UN agencies including OCHA oPt and UNRWA.

The ruling was significant not only for its immediate effect — parts held at a US air base in Woensdrecht were blocked from onward transfer — but for its legal reasoning. Dutch judges applied the standard embedded in European Union Common Position 2008/944/CFSP, which prohibits export licences where there is a clear risk that weapons will be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law. The February 2024 decision demonstrated that domestic and regional export-control frameworks, when enforced, carry real teeth.

The UK High Court and the CAAT Challenge

In the United Kingdom, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) brought judicial review proceedings against the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, challenging the government’s decision to continue issuing export licences for arms to Israel. The High Court heard the case in April and May 2024.

CAAT’s legal argument centred on the UK government’s own consolidated export-licensing criteria, which — mirroring the EU framework — require ministers to refuse licences where there is a clear risk of arms being used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law. The organisation argued the government had not applied those criteria lawfully given the documented scale of civilian harm in Gaza, drawing on reports from UN OHCHR, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.

In July 2024, the Court of Appeal ruled against the government, finding that the decision-making process for assessing the risk of international humanitarian law violations had been unlawful. The court held that ministers had failed to properly assess whether Israel had committed past violations — a required step under the licensing criteria. The UK government subsequently suspended a number of export licences covering weapons components including parts for combat aircraft, though it maintained licences for other categories. The legal proceedings remained active as of the time of writing, with CAAT continuing to press for broader suspension.

Article 6 of the Arms Trade Treaty and State Obligations

Both the Dutch and British cases draw their moral and legal grammar, in part, from the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which entered into force in 2014. Article 6 of the ATT establishes absolute prohibitions: a state party shall not authorise transfers of conventional arms if it has knowledge at the time of authorisation that those arms would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, or grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

Article 7 sets out a risk-assessment obligation: even where Article 6 does not apply, exporting states must assess the potential that transferred arms could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law, and must decline the export if the risk is overriding. Germany and Italy, alongside the United Kingdom, are ATT states parties. The United States signed the treaty but the Senate has not ratified it, leaving Washington outside the treaty’s formal obligations — though US domestic law, including the Foreign Assistance Act and the Leahy Law, imposes its own conditions on military assistance.

The Genocide Convention: The Question of Complicity

Running parallel to the export-control litigation is a broader legal question rooted in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice, filed in December 2023, alleges that Israel’s conduct in Gaza violates the Genocide Convention. On 26 January 2024, the ICJ issued provisional measures ordering Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the convention and to preserve evidence.

That ICJ proceeding has sharpened arguments in domestic courts and among legal scholars. The Genocide Convention’s Article I obliges all contracting parties — including arms-supplying states — not merely to refrain from genocide but to prevent it. Scholars including Rabea Eghbariah and international lawyers writing for outlets such as the European Journal of International Law have argued that continued arms transfers to a party facing credible genocide allegations may engage the complicity and prevention obligations of supplying states. No supplying state has been found complicit in a judicial ruling as of the time of writing, but the legal architecture for such a finding exists and is being tested.

For Palestinians in Gaza — for families sheltering in schools designated as UNRWA facilities that have nonetheless been struck, for surgeons operating in hospitals that have lost power and supplies — these courtroom proceedings are not abstractions. They represent the only current mechanism through which the material underpinning of the offensive is being subjected to legal scrutiny. Whether that scrutiny produces durable constraint remains, for now, an open question.

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