Government approves NIS 1 billion toward ‘urgent’ purchase of 12 Apache helicopters

The government conducted a telephone vote Wednesday morning to approve transferring just over a billion shekels (over $300 million) in budget funds to the Defense Ministry for an “urgent classified procurement.”

The NIS 1.03 billion will go toward procuring a squadron of 12 AH-64E Apache helicopters the Israeli Air Force has sought for several years. In January, the US approved the potential sale of 30 Apaches and related equipment to Israel for $3.8 billion.

A draft resolution stated that the government will cut money from the five-year plan for investment in Israel’s Arab society, including NIS 169 million ($55 million) in 2027, NIS 342 million ($111 million) in 2028, and NIS 453 million ($147 million) in 2029.

In recent weeks, there have been major budget disputes between the Defense Ministry and the Finance Ministry, with media reports, apparently stemming from briefings by defense officials, claiming that Israel had missed the deadline to carry out the deal with Boeing for the Apaches, and that their delivery would be delayed by several years as another customer will take Israel’s place.

Channel 12 cited defense sources as saying that last Thursday Defense Minister Israel Katz asked his ministry’s director general to approach the US Defense Department and ask for another extension on the Apache deal, after four previous ones, with the last deadline passing last week. US officials responded that Jerusalem had until Wednesday to seal the deal. It was that renewed deadline that injected urgency into finding the cash for the deal.

The budgeting adjustments were proposed by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who reportedly said he is against the purchase.

At a summit of the Association of Investment Houses, Smotrich said he thought the deal was a “mistake” and that he had said as much to fellow ministers, the Globes business outlet reported.

Smotrich said he believed the role of the attack helicopters can be filled using advanced drones, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had insisted on the Apache deal.

The minister said that in August the government approved the purchase on the basis of a financial plan, but a sudden need to pay for the helicopters meant “we found a temporary budget source,” while noting that the current government never agreed to the five-year plan for the Arab community.

The groundbreaking NIS 30 billion ($8.3 billion) program was created in 2021 under the short-lived Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid-led government, with the Social Equality Ministry bearing most of the responsibility for its implementation. It was designed to bring Arab communities on par with Jewish counterparts in areas such as housing, policing, and economic development, after decades of neglect.

Last December, the government cut NIS 220 million ($68.5 million) from the program and allocated it to the police to combat “severe nationalistic crime” in the Arab community.

Military costs have surged as Israel wages costly wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, as well as operations in Yemen, since the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, with the military also seeking to significantly expand its forces that were found lacking in preventing the Hamas massacre and subsequent wars.

The state budget that was passed in March already allotted the Defense Ministry a record NIS 143 billion ($45.8 billion), or about 17 percent of the total spending bill.

In July, the Finance Ministry said it had reached an agreement with the Defense Ministry to immediately transfer an additional NIS 15 billion ($5.01 billion) in budget funds for the military amid claims by the IDF that it was on the verge of grounding an array of units.

According to Channel 12, the government is also mulling an additional NIS 2.5 billion cut from all ministries for the sake of defense purchases.

The network cited sources as saying the defense establishment has a NIS 40 billion deficit in its budget for 2026.