The United States under the administrations of both Biden and Trump, has provided at least $21.7 billion in military assistance to Israel since the Gaza war started two years ago.
This week marked two years since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people and provoked the Israeli military’s slaughter of over 67,000 Palestinians.
A new report, published on Tuesday, the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, provides an account of the United States’ support for Israel….support, as one analyst said, that made possible the mass destruction and killing that Israel continues to carry out across Gaza.
According to Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of a new report published by the organization along with the Costs of War Project at Brown University: “The devastating damage the current Israeli government has done to Gaza and its people would not have been possible without US financing, US-supplied weapons, and US assistance with spare parts and maintenance”
He added “Our research highlights numbers, but we must never lose sight of this key fact: What we’re talking about is human suffering.”
ABC News reports: Another study, also published by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, says the U.S. has spent roughly $10 billion more on security aid and operations in the broader Middle East in the past two years.
While the reports rely on open source material for most of their findings, they offer some of the most comprehensive accountings of U.S. military aid to close ally Israel and estimated costs of direct American military involvement in the Middle East.
The State Department had no immediate comment about the amount of military aid provided to Israel since October 2023. The White House referred questions to the Pentagon, which oversees only a portion of the assistance.
The reports, which draw on publicly available notifications to Congress, were released as President Donald Trump presses for an end to the war in Gaza. Israeli and Hamas officials launched indirect talks in Egypt this week after Hamas accepted some elements of the U.S. plan that Israel also said it supported.
The reports, which are sharply critical of Israel, say that without the U.S. assistance, Israel would not have been able to sustain its concerted campaign against Hamas in Gaza. They note that tens of billions of dollars in future funding for Israel is projected under various bilateral agreements.