Report finds US spent record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in year of war

Brown University’s Costs of War project says additional $4.86 billion went into boosted military deployment in Middle East, including campaign against Houthi maritime attacks

US CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael Kurilla (right) meets with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi (left) and other generals at the IDF HQ in Tel Aviv, September 8, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)
US CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael Kurilla (right) meets with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi (left) and other generals at the IDF HQ in Tel Aviv, September 8, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

WASHINGTON — The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the year since the unprecedented onslaught by Palestinian terror group Hamas in southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza, according to a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project.

An additional $4.86 billion has gone into stepped-up US military operations in the region since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, which has led to escalating conflict around the Middle East, researchers said in findings released on the anniversary of the attack and first provided to The Associated Press. That figure includes the costs of a US Navy-led campaign to quell strikes on commercial shipping by Yemen’s Houthis, who claim to carry them out in solidarity with the fellow Iranian-backed group Hamas.

The report — completed before Israel in late September stepped up its campaign against Lebanon’s Tehran-backed Hezbollah terror group, which had been attacking Israel since October 8 last year — is one of the first tallies of estimated US costs as President Joe Biden’s administration backs Israel in its conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon and seeks to contain hostilities by Iranian proxies in the region.

The financial toll is on top of the cost in human lives: Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in Israel a year ago and took 251 hostages. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says almost 42,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the subsequent fighting, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

At least 1,400 people in Lebanon, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed since Israel greatly expanded its strikes in that country in late September.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields — fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques — and that Hezbollah similarly places its military assets in the heart of civilian towns and Beirut neighborhoods.

The financial costs were calculated by Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has assessed the full costs of US wars since the September 11, 2001, attacks, and fellow researchers William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler.

The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and other warships crosses the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf on November 26, 2023. (Information Technician Second Class Ruskin Naval/US Navy via AP)

Here’s a look at where some of the US taxpayer money went:

Record military aid to Israel

Israel — an ally of the United States since its 1948 founding — is the biggest recipient of US military aid in history, getting $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, the report says.

Even so, the $17.9 billion spent since October 7, 2023, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is by far the most military aid sent to Israel in one year. The US committed to providing billions in military assistance to Israel and Egypt each year when they signed their 1979 US-brokered peace treaty, and an agreement since Barack Obama’s presidency set the annual amount for Israel at $3.8 billion through 2028.

The US aid since the war started includes military financing, arms sales, at least $4.4 billion in drawdowns from US stockpiles and hand-me-downs of used equipment.

Much of the US weapons delivered in the year were munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bunker-busters and precision-guided bombs.

Expenditures range from $4 billion to replenish the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems to cash for rifles and jet fuel, the study says.

Unlike the United States’ publicly documented military aid to Ukraine, it was impossible to get the full details of what the US has shipped Israel since the last October 7, so the $17.9 billion for the year is a partial figure, the researchers said.

They accused the Biden administration of “efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering.”

The funding has divided Americans during the country’s presidential campaign. But support for Israel has long carried weight in US politics, and Biden said Friday that “no administration has helped Israel more than I have.”

The image provided by US Central Command shows American and Israeli forces placing the Trident Pier on the coast of Gaza Strip on May 16, 2024. (US Central Command via AP)

US military operations in the Middle East

The Biden administration has bolstered its military strength in the region since the war started, aiming to deter and respond to any attacks on Israeli and American forces.

Those additional operations cost at least $4.86 billion, the report said, not including beefed-up US military aid to Egypt and other partners in the region.

The US had 34,000 forces in the Middle East the day that Hamas broke through the Gaza border into southern Israel and carried out its massacre. That number rose to about 50,000 in August, when two aircraft carriers were in the region, aiming to discourage retaliation after a strike attributed to Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. The total is now around 43,000.

The number of US vessels and aircraft deployed — aircraft carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, fighter squadrons, and air defense batteries — in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has varied during the year.

The Pentagon has said another aircraft carrier strike group is headed to Europe very soon and that could increase the troop total again if two carriers are again in the region at the same time.

This undated photograph released on January 16, 2024, by the US military’s Central Command shows what it is described as Iranian-made missile components bound for Yemen’s Houthi seized off a vessel in the Arabian Sea. (US Central Command via AP)

The fight against the Houthis

The US military has deployed since the start of the war to try to counter escalated strikes by the Houthis, an armed faction that controls Yemen’s capital and northern areas, and has been firing on merchant ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Hamas. The researchers called the $4.86 billion cost to the US an “unexpectedly complicated and asymmetrically expensive challenge.”

Houthis have kept launching attacks on ships traversing the critical trade route, drawing US strikes on launch sites and other targets. The campaign has become the most intense running sea battle the US Navy has faced since World War II.

“The US has deployed multiple aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers and expensive multimillion-dollar missiles against cheap Iranian-made Houthi drones that cost $2,000,” the authors said.

Just Friday, the US military struck more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, going after weapons systems, bases and other equipment, officials said.

The researchers’ calculations included at least $55 million in additional combat pay from the intensified operations in the region.

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