The Private Weapons Supply Lines to Israel

While diplomats debate and courts issue rulings, a shadow network of shipowners, insurers, and technology suppliers is making billions from a weapons pipeline that fuels what scholars and UN experts now describe as a genocidal campaign. This investigation maps the corporate machinery—and the profits—behind the carnage.

On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice found it "plausible" that Israel's campaign in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention. The ruling was historic. It was also, from a commercial standpoint, almost irrelevant. Over the following twenty-one months, at least 2,603 consignments of military-related goods entered Israel, valued at roughly $885 million. Ninety-one percent arrived after the court's warning. The shipments came from fifty-one countries—not just the United States, but India, Romania, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and every major European economy that had publicly voiced concern about civilian casualties.

This is not a story about states failing to act. It is a story about private companies succeeding—spectacularly—in filling the gap. And it is a story about how the ordinary mechanics of maritime commerce have been repurposed into an infrastructure of ethnic cleansing, with profit margins to match.

The Economics of Complicity

The weapons trade to Israel is, by any measure, lucrative. Global military spending surpassed $2.4 trillion in 2024, and Israel's own defense imports have surged since October 2023. But the real money is not in the headline contracts—the F-35 sales, the state-to-state munitions deals. It is in the margins: the freight premiums for high-risk cargo, the insurance fees for voyages that may or may not be legal, the technology licensing for dual-use components that fall just outside export controls.

Consider the maritime sector. A Greek shipowner who agrees to carry military-adjacent cargo to Israel during an active ICJ investigation commands a premium. The risk is real—not of prosecution, but of reputational damage, port refusals, and crew reluctance. That risk is priced in. The same dynamic applies to insurers: underwriting a voyage that may violate an arms embargo carries a higher premium than insuring a routine container ship. The shadow fleet that emerged to carry Russian oil after 2022 demonstrated that sanctioned cargoes can be moved profitably; the same infrastructure now serves the Israel trade.

A joint investigation by Middle East Eye and the No Harbour for Genocide campaign documented at least 57 covert crude oil shipments to Israel via the Turkish port of Ceyhan between May 2024 and December 2025—47 million barrels delivered by Greek-managed vessels that listed false destinations and disabled their AIS transponders. At least 13 shipments of ammunition and machine gun components used by Elbit Systems, Israel's largest arms manufacturer, were carried on similar vessels during 2025. Satellite imagery confirmed the ships were docked in Israel while their trackers were dark.

This is not improvisation. It is a business model. The techniques of the shadow fleet—identity laundering, AIS manipulation, transshipment through weakly monitored ports—were perfected in the Russian oil trade and are now applied to weapons bound for Gaza. The global shadow fleet now numbers over 1,300 vessels, one in five oil tankers worldwide. The infrastructure exists. The demand exists. The profits exist.

The Agenda Behind the Commerce

But the weapons trade is not merely profitable. It serves a political project that human rights organizations, UN experts, and a growing number of genocide scholars have identified as ethnic cleansing.

In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese told the General Assembly that Israel's campaign in Gaza bore "the hallmarks of genocide." In March 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed acts constituting genocide, including "the deliberate infliction of conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza." By mid-2026, the death toll exceeded 72,000, with thousands more buried under rubble and the majority of Gaza's housing stock destroyed.

The weapons flowing through private supply chains make this possible. The F-35 fighter jets—whose components moved through Liège airport on FedEx flights—carried out thousands of strikes. The ammunition offloaded at Ashkelon supplied the artillery that flattened neighborhoods. The dual-use technology—server hardware, drone components, AI targeting systems—enabled the surveillance and targeting infrastructure that made mass casualty events possible.

This is where the profit motive and the political agenda converge. The private companies that move the cargo are not, for the most part, ideologically committed to Israel's campaign. They are committed to revenue. But their revenue depends on the campaign continuing. Every shipment delivered is a contract fulfilled, a premium collected, a relationship maintained. The corporate supply chain does not ask whether the cargo will be used in a genocide; it asks whether the insurance covers the voyage and whether the charter party has been breached.

The effect is a system that is structurally indifferent to civilian life—and structurally aligned with the military objectives of the state receiving the weapons. The private sector does not need to share Israel's agenda. It only needs to profit from it.

The Maritime Shadow Route: Profit at Sea

The most visible conduit is the sea. But the vessels that carry military cargo rarely fly the flags of their beneficial owners or depart from easily monitored ports. They operate through flags of convenience—Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands—open registries with minimal oversight and maximum anonymity. The incentives are economic: lower taxes, lax labor enforcement, and, critically, the ability to disappear from tracking systems.

The Greek shipping companies documented in the Middle East Eye investigation exploited these mechanisms systematically. Between May 2024 and December 2025, vessels managed by Kyklades Maritime Corporation and Thenamaris Ships Management delivered crude oil and military materials to Israel while listing false destinations such as Port Said and disabling their AIS transponders—a violation of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, but one that flag states rarely enforce.

The profits from these voyages are substantial. High-risk cargo commands premium rates. The shipowners bear legal risk—not criminal, but contractual—and they price that risk accordingly. The insurers who underwrite the voyages collect premiums that reflect the elevated chance of reputational or legal complications. The flag registries collect fees regardless of what the vessels carry. Each actor in the chain takes a cut, and each has an incentive to look the other way.

The Dual-Use Pipeline: Technology as Weapon

The most sensitive components do not arrive in crates marked "munitions." They arrive as commercial technology—server hardware, drone parts, software licenses, machine tools—that falls outside traditional arms export controls until it is integrated into a weapons platform.

Amnesty International's June 2026 criminal complaint against FedEx Belgium illustrates the gap. The complaint alleges that FedEx transported F-35 components through Liège airport without the required transit license. An October 2024 shipment subject to U.S. ITAR regulations traveled from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Nevatim Air Base in Israel. When Israel's airspace closed during the June 2025 Iran war, FedEx stated that "certain ITAR-regulated shipments may have transited Liège inadvertently"—unloaded, trucked to Cologne, and flown onward to Israel.

FedEx denies wrongdoing. But the distinction between a completed weapon and a component is precisely where dual-use procurement operates. The F-35's supply chain spans dozens of countries; each piece is licensed separately, and each license is approved with the understanding that the end user is a NATO ally—not a country under ICJ investigation for genocide.

The same logic applies to surveillance and targeting technology. Israel's military operations in Gaza have relied on AI-assisted targeting, drone swarms, and real-time intelligence analysis—capabilities that depend on advanced computing hardware sourced through global supply chains. These are classified as commercial goods, not weapons, and are subject to far lighter export controls. Yet they are as essential to modern military operations as ammunition.

The Corporate Backers: Insurance and Logistics

Every ship needs insurance. Every policy needs a reinsurer. And the reinsurance market, even when it claims to have divested from controversial cargoes, often finds ways to recycle risk back into the same financial centers that impose the sanctions.

A Reuters investigation published in July 2026 exposed how Maritime Mutual, a New Zealand-based protection and indemnity insurer, became a critical enabler of the shadow fleet carrying sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil. Maritime Mutual placed "a chunk of its business" with vessels that switched off their AIS transponders or manipulated tracking data—274 such instances were identified by Global Fishing Watch between 2021 and mid-2025 among ships insured by the company. Maritime Mutual's reinsurers include Lloyd's of London syndicates, Germany's Munich Re and Hannover Re, and Britain's MS Amlin and Atrium. Aon and Lockton, two of the world's largest insurance brokers, acted as its brokers.

The relevance to Israel's supply chain is structural. The insurance market that tolerates AIS manipulation for Russian oil tankers is the same market that covers commercial vessels carrying military-adjacent cargo to Israel. When a Greek-managed ship goes dark in the Mediterranean and reappears at Ashkelon, someone is underwriting that voyage. The reinsurance chains that connect back to European financial markets—Lloyd's, Munich, the London brokerage houses—provide the invisible backstop that makes the entire system viable.

The corporate backers are not villains in the cartoonish sense. They are rational actors responding to incentives. Shipping companies profit from high-risk cargoes that pay premium rates. Flag registries collect fees regardless of cargo. Insurers collect premiums and spread risk through reinsurance. Freight forwarders move goods as directed by their customers. The system produces the outcome it is designed to produce: efficient, profitable logistics that are indifferent to the destination of the cargo—and to the bodies that cargo will destroy.

he Timeliness: Why This Matters Now

The ICJ's January 2024 ruling did not end the weapons flow to Israel. It clarified the legal stakes. The Genocide Convention obligates states not only to refrain from committing genocide but to prevent it. The Arms Trade Treaty, ratified by many of the supplying countries, prohibits transfers when there is an overriding risk that the weapons will be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Yet the corporate architecture described here is designed to evade exactly this kind of legal accountability. The entities that move the cargo—the shipping companies, the insurers, the freight forwarders—are not states. They are not parties to the Genocide Convention or the Arms Trade Treaty. They are private companies whose obligations are contractual, not humanitarian. When a Greek shipowner turns off a transponder and lists a false destination, the legal question is not whether the cargo will be used in a genocide; it is whether the insurance policy covers the voyage and whether the charter party has been breached.

This is the gap that international law has not yet closed: the space between state obligation and corporate action. The shadow fleet that sustains Israel's weapons supply is not a state-run operation. It is a network of private companies, each acting within the letter of its own domestic law, collectively producing an outcome that the ICJ has identified as a plausible genocide. Exposing this network—naming the shipowners, the insurers, the flag registries, the technology suppliers—is a necessary first step toward closing the gap.

Conclusion: The Business of Genocide

The story of how weapons reach Israel is not primarily a story about the United States. It is a story about the thousands of private decisions—to register a ship in Panama, to insure it through a New Zealand mutual, to route a cargo through Liège, to manufacture a component in India and ship it to a defense contractor in Israel—that together constitute the infrastructure of violence.

International courts can issue rulings. States can impose embargoes. Port workers can strike. But as long as the corporate supply chain remains opaque, fragmented, and legally insulated, the cargo will continue to move. The investigation proposed here would use AIS telemetry, corporate registries, customs records, and field verification to map that chain—not as an abstraction, but as a network of named companies, identifiable vessels, and specific financial arrangements.

The dead in Gaza number over 72,000, with thousands more buried under rubble. The weapons that killed them were not delivered by magic. They were shipped, insured, and tracked by private companies whose names appear in corporate registries and whose vessels appear—sometimes, briefly, before going dark—on maritime tracking platforms. The task of journalism is to make those connections visible, and to ask the question that the corporate supply chain is designed to avoid: who, exactly, is profiting from genocide?