Above photo: A protester holds a sign and banner as he marches with other demonstrators on Kearny Street as they demand the U.S. stop sending arms to Israel on Monday, November 11, 2024 in San Francisco. Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images.
This is just the “tip of the iceberg,” Costs of War noted.
Many other transfers haven’t been disclosed.
The U.S. has spent over $30 billion supporting the Israeli military and conducting war across the Middle East over the first two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — a genocide only made possible by the U.S.’s financial support, a new report concludes.
Brown University’s Costs of War project released a series of reports on the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attack, finding that the U.S. has sent at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel between October 2023 and September 2025.
This record-breaking amount of aid is just the “tip of the iceberg,” with replenishments like Israel’s access to U.S. weapons stockpiles in the Middle East likely not included in publicly reported totals.
The total doesn’t include weapons shipments that were never publicly disclosed or that have been pledged, but not yet sent. In 2024, for instance, the Biden administration approved a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel that would maintain a flow of weapons and military equipment to Israel as far out as 2029.
Costs of War points to a Center for International Policy report from August that found that the State Department has reported 751 Foreign Military Sales related to Israel, with a total value of $39.2 billion as of April 2025.
In addition, the U.S. has spent between $9.7 and $12.1 billion on military operations supporting Israel’s post-October 7 wars in the Middle East, the group found. This includes operations in Yemen and Iran.
In total, the U.S. has spent between $31 billion and $34 billion in two years of war and assaults in the region, the research found.
The majority of Israel’s military equipment comes from the U.S., the report notes. As such, without U.S. backing, the scale of Israel’s genocide and destruction in Gaza would not be possible.
“Without U.S. money, weapons and political support, the Israeli military could not have committed such rapid, widespread destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Gaza, or escalated its warfare so easily to the regional level by bombing Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and Iran,” the report concludes.
“Without U.S. support, the Israeli government would have no combat aircraft to drop bombs and many fewer bombs. An increasing share of Israel’s arsenal would be down for maintenance without U.S. government or U.S. contractor mechanics and spare parts. In addition, Israel’s government could not have built a military of its current size and sophistication without U.S. financial backing,” it goes on.
In the first two years of the genocide, Israel has killed or injured 10 percent of Gaza’s population, with about 67,000 people killed and 170,000 injured, according to the official toll. This is likely a vast undercount, experts have noted, with the true death toll from traumatic injury and other causes like starvation potentially reaching six-figure counts.
Israel’s aggression in the Middle East has caused massive amounts of unrest across not just Palestine, but also Lebanon and other countries, Costs of War noted.
Another report published by the group estimates that at least 5.3 million people, including 1.9 million children, have been forcibly displaced across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Israel, Iran, and Lebanon since the genocide began, with many having never returned home. This doesn’t include displacement from Syria and Yemen, due to incomplete data from the war-torn countries.
