The U.S. has spent more than $22B on military aid to Israel and on funding Israeli aggressions across the region over the past year, a new report says.
According to a report published by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the U.S. has given Israel $17.9 billion in military aid since the onset of the genocidal war on Gaza last October. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this marks the highest amount of military aid to the regime.
The figure surpasses U.S. military aid to the regime during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
The dollar figure is also nearly quadruple the amount given to Israel in the 1980s during its war against the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon, its 15-year occupation of Lebanon, and its 2006 war against Hezbollah, the Middle East Eye said.
According to the report, the aid to Israel includes military financing, weapons sales, and transfers from U.S. weapons stockpiles.
The report highlights how U.S. taxpayer dollars given to Israel as part of military aid have surged in the past year.
Its authors, however, cautioned the figure is incomplete, citing the U.S. administration’s “efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering.”
“The figure of $17.9 billion in U.S. security assistance to Israel from October 2023 to September 2024 is a fraction of the full value of U.S. support for this war, which will only be determined over time,” they said.
The report also noted that the U.S. has spent an additional $4.8 billion funding pro-Israel operations in the region, including in Yemen, since the eruption of the war.
Since the onset of the war, the Yemeni forces have carried out scores of operations in support of the war-hit Gazans, striking targets throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in addition to targeting Israeli ships or vessels heading towards ports in the occupied territories.
The United States and the United Kingdom have been carrying out strikes against Yemen after the Biden administration and its allies offered the Tel Aviv regime unqualified support and said that Yemeni forces bear the consequences of their attacks against Israeli-owned ships or merchant vessels heading to the occupied territories.
The unwavering support of the U.S. for Israel came despite opposition from some American officials, lawmakers and many human rights groups concerned about the killing of civilians in Gaza, and now the West Bank and Lebanon.
“America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza,” former U.S. government officials, including former members of the U.S. State Department and military, said in a joint statement in July.
Israel launched the war on Gaza after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity on October 7, 2023, in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed more than 41,909 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 97,303 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.
Israel has also been targeting Lebanon since October 2023, when it launched the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been responding to the aggression with numerous retaliatory operations.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in Israel’s attacks against Lebanon in the past year, according to the Arab country’s Health Ministry. The report was released Oct. 7.
(PressTV.ir)
