Germany, Greece, Romania, the Czechs, and Finland also licensed millions of euros of Israel arms exports in 2024, according to the latest EU data.
Andrew Rettman
France, Germany, and Greece led EU arms sales to Israel in 2024, even as pressure now builds for new sanctions due to ongoing Israeli war crimes.
Romania, the Czech Republic, and Finland also licensed millions of euros of arms exports to Israel in 2024, despite its mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the time, which led the International Criminal Court to issue a war-crimes indictment against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the same year.
France granted some €362m of arms-export licences to Israel in 2024, according to the latest EU data published on Wednesday (29 April), while Germany granted €169m, Greece €114m, Romania €103m, the Czechs €35m, and Finland €17m.
Hungary (€6m), Latvia (€4m), and Croatia (€2m) granted minor amounts of permits, while Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Poland each also issued €1m or fewer.
The EU figures do not detail actual arms deliveries or new orders, but still give their own snapshot of what is usually a secretive sector.
Drilling into the data, most of the 2024 French licences covered parts and military software, but there were also €122m of “ammunition” and €18m of “bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices.”
German licences included €48m of armoured vehicles, €37m of ammunition, and €13m of bombs.
Greece licensed €114m of “imaging or countermeasure equipment”, Romania permitted €43m of bomb exports, the Czechs allowed €11m of ammunition and bombs, while Finland licensed €17m of military software.
The EU figures are symbolic in size compared to US military aid to Israel, worth over $16bn (€14bn) in 2024.
French double standards?
Many of the leading EU exporters (such as Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) are Israeli allies, while others, such as Greece and Romania, have not taken a strong stand on Israeli war crimes.
But France has been a prominent critic of Israeli atrocities and joined Sweden in April in calling for sanctions on Israeli settler exports from the West Bank, even as French arms-export policy went in the opposite direction.
