Reports: Israel couldn’t wage wars on Gaza, Lebanon Iran without US support

Israel would not have been able to sustain its wars across the Middle East without the United States’s significant financial backing of more than $21bn since October 2023, according to a pair of new reports.

The reports, which were released by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, found that: without US weapons and money, Israel wouldn’t have been able to sustain its genocidal war on Gaza, start a war with Iran, or repeatedly bomb Yemen.

The report’s findings are also backed up by analysts who said Israel’s wars in Gaza and in the wider region could not have continued without US financial and diplomatic support.

“US support for Israel at all levels is indispensable to the prosecution of Israel’s war both in Gaza and across the region,” Omar H Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told media.

Israel’s war on Gaza alone has killed at least 67,160 people and wounded another 169,679 since October 2023.

Thousands are still believed to be under the Gaza Strip’s ruins, while Israel has killed dozens in strikes on Yemen and killed more than 1,000 people when it attacked Iran in June.

Israel needs US financing for war

Two years ago, 1,139 people died during a Hamas-led attack on Israel, and more than 200 were taken captive.

Israel’s response was to devastate Gaza and to wage a wider war against any group it considered hostile in the region.

It increased raids in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; killed over 4,000 people in Lebanon while eviscerating swaths of villages; invaded and occupied Lebanese and Syrian land; bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus and started a 12-day war with Iran; and traded attacks with Yemen’s Houthis.

But Israel couldn’t have maintained these wars without constant US support, researchers found.

“Given the scale of current and future spending, it is clear the [Israeli army] could not have done the damage they have done in Gaza or escalated their military activities throughout the region without US financing, weapons, and political support,” read the report – US Military Aid and Arms Transfers to Israel, October 2023–September 2025 – by William D Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Hartung’s report was jointly released by the Costs of War and the Quincy Institute, which describes itself as promoting “ideas that move US foreign policy away from endless war, toward military restraint and diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace”.

Hartung’s findings and a companion report by Linda J Bilmes, an expert on budgeting and public finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, found that the US spent “a total of $31.35 – $33.77 billion and counting” since October 7, 2023 in military aid to Israel and in “US military operations in the region”.

They show how US support for Israel has helped it continue to wage war on multiple fronts for two years, and analysts backed up the reports’ conclusions.

“Israel needs US arms in order to do what it is doing,” Rahman said.

“It has dropped an excessive amount of ordinance on Gaza and elsewhere. It produces certain weapons and technology, but it doesn’t manufacture the bombs, so without the US, it couldn’t drop those bombs.”

Bipartisan support

The US has long been Israel’s most fervent backer. When it comes to US foreign aid, Israel is the largest annual recipient (at around $3.3bn yearly) and the largest cumulative one (more than $150bn until 2022).

Over decades and despite the changing of administrations, US support for Israel was constant.

Hartung’s report specifically mentions that the administrations of both US President Joe Biden and his successor, Donald Trump, committed tens of billions of dollars in arms sales agreements, including services and weapons that will be paid for in the coming years.

“[This] bipartisan support … allowed a serial violator of international law for pretty much its entire existence with the support of the democratic West without being questioned in a significant way in the political and social mainstream,” Rahman said.

However, many Americans have started to move away from the mainstream position on Israel. In recent months, as scholars declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, public perception of Israel in the US has severely degraded.

This drop is also true among American Jews. According to a recent Washington Post poll, four in 10 US Jews believe Israel is committing genocide, while more than 60 percent say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.

US always finds billions to assist Israel

And analysts believe that could have a big impact going forward for anyone in US politics.

“Some former Biden administration officials may hope that they won’t have to deal with this, but they are living in a fantasy world,” Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC, told media.

“I don’t think any Democrat can win a primary in 2028 without acknowledging the Biden administration inflicted and helped perpetrate a genocide,” he said.

In addition to US public criticism of Israel’s actions in the Middle East, analysts say figures like the ones shown by the Costs of War Project’s reports may also draw ire from Americans frustrated by where their tax dollars are going.

“Budgets are about priorities, but even though Americans have the thinnest social safety net of any modern country, somehow we always seem to find billions upon billions of dollars to assist Israel in its various wars,” Duss said.

“Anyone who has ever tried to do a household budget can see how absurd it is, but it is also reflective of the broader corruption of American politics.

“It’s not just Israeli interests, it’s also the US industrial complex, who are making money hand over fist, because so much of this aid and assistance is not just arms sales but granting of assistance that’s going to a lot of US companies.”