Weapons & Arms Trade
Arms Trade to Israel
Israel's arms imports mainly come from the US and, to a lesser extent, Germany, France and the UK. The US is, of course, Israel's main supporter and provider of arms. It provides Israel with $3bn in annual aid and in 2001 alone US arms sales to Israel were worth $2.95bn. Germany is Israel's next biggest arms supplier -- between 1996 and 2000, it supplied Israel with weaponry worth $765m. France exported major conventional weapons worth $50m to Israel between 1996 and 2000.
Cluster bombs and flechette shells
Cluster bombs are heavy ordinance which, when detonated, release hundreds of darts (flechettes) or other fragments of metal shrapnel. They are designed to target human beings and have been used on several occasions by Israel against Palestinians, with many civilian casualties.
Military Aid
Israel's arms imports mainly come from the US and, to a lesser extent, Germany, France and the UK. The US is, of course, Israel's main supporter and provider of arms. It provides Israel with $3bn in annual aid and in 2001 alone US arms sales to Israel were worth $2.95bn. Germany is Israel's next biggest arms supplier - between 1996 and 2000, it supplied Israel with weaponry worth $765m. France exported major conventional weapons worth $50m to Israel between 1996 and 2000.
Nuclear Weapons
|  |
| | Mordechai Vanunu |
The existance of Israel's secret nuclear weapons program was first confirmed in September 1996, when Israeli whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu provided Sunday Times journalist Peter Hounam with photographs and technical information about the Dimona facility. Vanunu had served in the Israeli army and then went to work in the Dimona nuclear "research center" in the Negev Desert near his home at Beersheba. The facility harbored an underground plutonium separation plant operated in strictest secrecy. Following his contact with the Sunday Times, before the article was published, Vanunu was lured to Rome by an Israeli agent and kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad. Vanunu served a sentence of 18 years imprisonment, 12 years of which were in solitary confinement. Freed by the Israeli government, he left behind concrete walls, but was thrown into a bureaucratic "prison" that denied him basic freedoms. On 11 November 2003 he was rearrested.
Related Websites
Links to websites and other resources concerned with weapons and arms sales to Israel.
Rubber- and plastic-coated metal bullets
"Rubber bullets" as are they typically characterised in the media, have been responsible for many injuries and deaths of Palestinians.
| |
|
