Maersk ships millions of pounds of military products to Israel

At the end of October, one more video from Gaza showed dozens of Palestinian men rounded up, blindfolded and transported by Israeli soldiers. In the footage, broadcast by an Israeli news channel, the Palestinian hostages, reportedly from the besieged northern Gaza town of Jabalia, were crammed into the cargo bed of an Israeli military truck.

The vehicle appears to be an Oshkosh M1085 5-Ton Long Cargo Medium Tactical Vehicle.

In the past year, the Israeli military has received at least 100 Oshkosh armored vehicles like the one in the video. They arrived on ships operated by the trading giant AP Moller Maersk.

Israel has long armored vehicles used as killing cars from the occupied Palestinian territories. Images of Palestinians crushed by Israeli tanks and trucks are now grimly familiar to anyone paying attention to the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Maersk’s role in transporting the Oshkosh armored vehicles came to light as part of a the new investigation from researchers at the Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International. The investigation details how Maersk has shipped millions of pounds of military goods, including hundreds of armored and tactical vehicles and their components, to the Israeli Ministry of Defense since the start of Israel’s genocidal war last year.

The findingshared in advance with The Intercept, reveals the significant role Maersk — a publicly traded, family-controlled company — played in the delivery of military goods to Israel, including tanks and other armored vehicles or their parts, aircraft components, armor plates, parts for artillery systems and many hundreds of transports that are unidentified or unspecified “military equipment”.

By analyzing shipment export data from more than 2,000 shipments over the past year, researchers report that they have uncovered a commercial supply chain full of materials destined for use in Israel’s attack on Gaza. The researchers said available shipping data suggested Maersk vessels violated Spanish embargo policy by transiting through the port of Algeciras.

The Spanish embargo prohibits cargo ships carrying weapons that could be used for war crimes from calling at Spanish ports; In May, the foreign ministry said the rule would apply to military assets destined for Israel. Since then, Maersk ships with military goods bound for Israel, including equipment to plant bombs on planes, have frequently transited through Algeciras, one of Europe’s largest ports, Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International researchers said. (Maersk did not respond to a request for comment.)

In response to a request for comment from El Diarioa Spanish newspaper that also had advanced access to the researchers’ findings, a Spanish foreign ministry spokesman said the government was reviewing the information and that “all necessary measures will be taken” to enforce the embargo.

“We can clearly state that Spain is breaking the law,” said Irene Montero, a member of the European Parliament from Spain’s leftist Podemos party. “Article 8.1 of Law 53/2007 on foreign trade in arms provides that the authorization for the transit of military material must be suspended when there are “rational indications” that the material will be used to aggravate conflicts, in a manner contrary to humane ones. dignity or in a violation of human rights”.

She added: “This means that even if the official destination of the military material is not Israel, if there are indications that the material could reach Israel and be used in a way that constitutes a violation of human rights, the Spanish government it should also ban the transit of those weapons.”

Spanish authorities turned away a ship carrying weapons bound for Israel in May, shortly after the embargo was explicitly imposed.

“This is the first time we have done this because it is the first time we have detected a ship carrying an arms shipment to Israel wanting to call at a Spanish port,” Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said. said at the time. “The Foreign Office will systematically reject such overtures for one obvious reason: the Middle East doesn’t need more weapons, it needs more peace.”

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Urging Spanish authorities to search the ships and enforce the ban, the researchers said data showed Maersk had made nearly 1,000 cargo shipments to the Israeli military via Algeciras since the embargo was announced.

“This is American genocide, funded by American military sales and manufactured by American arms companies.”

Organizers with the Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International hope their investigation into Maersk will draw attention to the global supply chains that enable Israel’s war, so activists can perfect your strategies.

“This is American genocide, funded by American military sales and manufactured by American arms companies,” said Kaleem Hawa of the Palestinian Youth Movement, lead researcher for the Maersk campaign. “Theirs is a cumulative system; of weapons components flowing to American manufacturers, weapons flowing to the Israeli military, and goods from stolen land flowing from Palestine – every chain of complicity that supports the Israeli project of mass death depends on logistics companies like Maersk.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, a diaspora group led by Palestinians, launch the “Mask Off Maersk” campaign last June to shed light on the shipping company’s role in facilitating the movement of material deployed in Israel’s attacks on Palestine and Lebanon. The group aims to build a movement around an extra-congressional strategy it calls the “people’s arms embargo.” The idea is to target the infrastructure that makes the Western-backed attack on Israel possible, through a strategy of mobilizations, divestments and job actions.

The US government is responsible for PROVIDING nearly 70% of Israel’s imported weapons, such as fighter jets, missiles and thousands of weapons of mass destruction. 2,000 pounds BOMBS.

Although it is often unclear what material is being delivered by Maersk, the company has been contracted by the Pentagon to transport weapons to Israel. Information about Maersk shipments to the Israeli military on behalf of the U.S. government is difficult to uncover, researchers said, because of the limited information available to the public about the nature of the shipments.

“Freight Shipments”

Research by the Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International focuses on the millions of pounds of military goods transported to Israel aboard Maersk merchant ships over the past year.

Most of the analyzed shipments departed from Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, the largest Maersk terminal on the East Coast, operated by subsidiary APM, which deals with more than 2,500 trucks worth of daily transports. Campaign researchers analyzed shipment data to scrape Harmonized System codes, or HS codes, to determine the nature of the content sent by Elizabeth to the Israeli military.

Interglobal Forwarding Services, an American company incorporated in New Jersey, operates as a US-based freight forwarder for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, ie the company that organizes the movement of goods.

The use of freight forwarders allows the Israeli military to hide the original manufacturer of military goods from the public, with only the freight forwarder listed as the “shipper”. Only by decoding the data from the bill of lading — the term for shipping contracts and documents — were researchers able to trace the contents back to the manufacturers of military goods.

Among the firms involved were Oshkosh Corporation and Rolls-Royce Solutions America, which makes the engines used in Israel’s Namer armored personnel carrier – also supplied by Maersk. (Oshkosh, Rolls-Royce and Interglobal did not respond to requests for comment.)

According to the researchers, several of the listed contents of the shipments correspond to “at least three” arms deals concluded between the US and Israel in the past year. The Biden administration has done it repeatedly approved US funding for Israel to buy American-made weapons, for example, blessing more than $700 million in both aid and sales of Oshkosh tactical vehicles.

In addition to the traceable shipments, the data analyzed by the researchers reveal large quantities of unidentified and unclassified military cargo sent from the US to the Israeli military on Maersk container ships.

“While most records in the dataset contain descriptions of the items contained in each shipment, a substantial number of records omit any such information,” the researchers said in a statement. “Unidentified cargo – shipments with completely blank descriptions of their contents in their bills of lading – accounted for nearly 35 percent of all shipments observed since the start of the Gaza war.”

More than 6 million pounds of cargo was shipped to the Israeli military by Maersk with “unidentified” content in shipping logs, with no specific content code or listing of a specific manufacturer as the shipper. Only Interglobal Forward services are listed.

Interglobal was criticized in 2017 report by the International Peace Information Service, an independent human rights research institute, for its shipping activities during Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. At the time, the freight forwarder’s shipping documents did not report the names of the companies actually transporting military equipment to Israel.

The 2017 report noted that nearly a decade ago, “bills of lading accompanying shipments of military and associated equipment to Israel on commercial vessels” were “poorly described and mostly in generic terms.” As with Maersk shipments over the past year, “Hundreds of bills of lading only included ‘military equipment’ as a cargo description.”

Now some Spanish observers want their government to take action to stop the flow of military goods through Spanish ports.

“The Spanish government has repeatedly lied about the sale, purchase and transit of arms to Israel during this genocidal year,” said Ione Belarra, a Podemos politician. “It is time for Spain and Europe to comply with their legal obligations and suspend all trade and diplomatic relations with a terrorist state like Israel.”