Assessing Amnesty’s Claims on India–Israel Arms Transfers

August 20, 2026 |
Issue Brief

Summary

Defence supply chains are complex and transnational. The presence of components and military-use items within defence supply chains does not, by itself, establish their sources or end use. It also does not establish that India incurred international legal responsibility for Israel’s military operations.

Introduction

Amnesty International published a report on 30 July 2026 titled “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”. The report’s overall narration accused India of supplying weapons and ammunition to Israel in support of the Gaza war. It warned that such supplies make India complicit in violations of international law.

India does not expect its growing defence-export sector to be exempt from scrutiny simply because it is an emerging industry. At the same time, serious allegations of international responsibility require a careful distinction between what the available evidence establishes and what is subsequently inferred from it. The report warrants scrutiny given how easily shipment records have been translated into conclusions about responsibility.

The report documents Indian-origin defence-related shipments to Israeli companies and identifies cases involving ammunition, weapon components and other military-use items. However, the evidence chain becomes considerably less straightforward when the report connects the shipments to specific Israeli military operations in Gaza and, subsequently, to India’s responsibility. The report itself acknowledges important limitations, including that it could not determine the volume of Indian-manufactured material transferred directly to the Israeli military.

The important question, therefore, is whether India’s participation in global defence supply chains is being assessed with sufficient precision in terms of causation and legal responsibility.

The Reality of Indian Supplies of Weapons to Israel

The first problem is one of categorisation. Amnesty’s figure of 2,596 shipments between October 2023 and November 2025 appears striking at first look.[1] But shipment counts do not, by themselves, indicate the number, value, or operational significance of weapons (or any other parts, components, or equipment) being transferred. Amnesty has not clearly stated the data sources for shipment tracking. It then identified the drone warheads, casings, machine-gun components, vehicle components, small arms parts and other military-related items being shipped to Israel. As per the report, these were supplied to Israeli defence companies rather than directly to the Israel Defense Forces.[2] This distinction matters. Because an Indian-made component entering an Israeli company’s production chain is not the same as India exporting a complete weapon directly to a military end-user.

A closer reading of Amnesty’s own numbers also complicates the first impression created by the headline figure of 2,596 shipments. The report states that, after analysing shipment descriptions and HS-code categories, it identified 788 consignments (30.35 per cent of the total sample) containing items for military use, excluding air defence equipment. The report identifies 354 shipments under the category “military weapons”, 389 under “other”, and 15 under “armoured and fighting vehicles”.[3] The report, however, does not make the derivation of this 788 figure readily reproducible from the category-level breakdown it provides. This is not sufficient to dismiss the underlying evidence, but it does demonstrate why the headline shipment count should not be presented as a count of weapons supplied to Israel.

Amnesty did not classify the remaining consignments as containing military-use items. This distinction is again important because the report frequently counts individual components, such as parts for small arms, explosive ordnance, and military vehicles, rather than complete weapons. Shipment, component and weapon are three different analytical units. Conflating them risks exaggerating the scale and perception of India’s defence exports. Amnesty’s dataset may help in understanding Indian participation in Israeli defence supply chains. Still, its catchy headline citing shipment counts should be accompanied by a qualifier noting that it identifies only a much smaller subset of military-use items.

Even SIPRI’s database covers only major conventional weapons and excludes many components and ammunition categories. No database can track every small component and machine part being sold across countries. SIPRI’s latest data is useful here. For 2021–25, the US accounted for 68 per cent of Israel’s major arms imports, Germany for 31 per cent, and Italy for about 1.3 per cent.[4] India doesn’t appear among Israel’s major arms suppliers.

There is also an important distinction between confirmed military use, probable military use and dual-use items. Amnesty itself acknowledges that it could not determine the volume of Indian-manufactured material transferred directly to the Israeli military.[5] Military use or dual-use parts and components originating in one country become part of complex global supply chains and defence systems, making direct attribution of battlefield use extremely difficult.[6] It does not establish that every shipment or even every military-use component identified was subsequently used in Gaza. The analytical distinction between a shipment, a component, a weapon, and a weapon demonstrably used in a particular military operation is therefore essential. Any assessment of India’s international responsibility must hence rest on more than the aggregate number of commercial consignments.

The 7 October Cut-Off: Selective Bias?

The report begins its data tracking from 7 October 2023—probably to signal the beginning of the present Gaza war.[7] The use of the 7 October date needs further investigation since Amnesty does not seem to have used it in its criticism of other Western suppliers of Israel. Defence manufacturing contracts do not operate on a simple order-and-delivery cycle. These are mostly long-term contracts, with production agreements that precede delivery by months or years.

Neither is India among the top suppliers to Israel, nor has there been any sudden spike in defence exports to Israel from India after the current war started. Also, as mentioned before, Indian exports to Israel are nowhere comparable to those of the USA, Germany and other countries. In the case of Italy (another major arms supplier to Israel), previously contracted sales continued after October 2023 following an assessment that the material concerned was not intended for use against civilians in Gaza.[8] The same distinction is relevant to assessing India’s post-October 2023 shipments.

The manufacturing relationships between Indian companies and Israeli firms go back many years. The Adani-Elbit joint venture, for example, has been producing aerostructures and subsystems for Israeli-origin Hermes 900 UAVs long before the Gaza war started.[9] The DRDO and other Indian firms had similarly developed partnerships with Israeli defence companies in ammunition and weapons manufacturing over the last 20 years.[10]

Another important aspect to consider here is India’s Defence Offsets policy.[11] Under this policy, which has been in place for two decades, foreign defence companies must invest a certain amount of the contract value back in India. This is achieved by buying defence products, components, or services from Indian companies. Nearly half of the offset contracts (by number) are currently being executed by Israeli companies in association with their Indian Offset Partners (IOPs).[12] This is a legitimate process.

Therefore, a consignment physically exported after 7 October does not by itself establish that India deliberately entered into new defence contracts with Israel because of the Gaza war or to enhance Israeli capabilities to conduct the war. Amnesty’s chronology establishes when goods moved, but does not state anything on the contents of the individual shipment or establish when the underlying obligation to supply was created. That distinction is crucial when assessing state responsibility.

Another weakness in Amnesty’s argument emerges when shipment-level evidence is connected to battlefield use in Gaza. The report identifies Indian-origin supplies of drone components, rifle parts, small arms and related parts. It then presents images of drones, rifles, guns, etc., from Gaza as evidence of involvement of Indian defence companies.[13] The fact that a manufacturer produces a particular weapons system does not necessarily establish that the specific Indian components documented by Amnesty were used in those weapons.

The same applies to ammunition also—an Indian shipment of outer casings of artillery shells to an Israeli defence company and the Israeli use of artillery shells in Gaza are not equivalent. Amnesty presents no evidence that the specific Indian consignment was used in the final product that went to war. The difference is therefore between traceability and demonstrated use. A supply-chain relationship that has been tracked and documented has been automatically converted into proof of battlefield use—and then used to show that India is violating international laws and ethics.

Knowledge of Risk and International Responsibility

An important observation in Amnesty’s argument is the movement from supply to potential legal complicity. This requires more than demonstrating that Indian goods entered an Israeli defence supply chain. To establish that an India-made component reached an Israeli defence company is one thesis; to say that Indian authorities knew about its eventual operational use, whether the relevant export was authorised under applicable rules, and whether the assistance meets the requisite legal threshold for complicity is another. It needs more nuanced attention than simply counting shipments and attributing complicity to the state.

Amnesty notes that discussions within the Indian government regarding individual export licence approvals are confidential.[14] That is a reasonable basis for asking whether India should publish greater information about its export-risk assessments. But the absence of publicly available data cannot itself establish that the relevant reasoning never happened or was deliberately misused to grant approvals. India’s export-control framework expressly incorporates end-use and security-related assessments.

Also, Amnesty’s reliance on Indian Supreme Court’s judgements is relevant to establish the domestic constitutional status of certain government-controlled entities. But establishing that an entity constitutes “State” under Article 12 does not, by itself, establish India’s international responsibility for the subsequent use of exported goods. Amnesty places particular emphasis on the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel proceedings and argues that, by January 2024 at the latest, India was aware of the risk of genocide.[15]

The difficulty lies in moving from knowledge of risk to legal responsibility for individual transfers. The existence of a serious risk plainly warrants heightened scrutiny and due diligence. It does not, by itself, establish that every subsequent transfer is wrongful. India’s Supreme Court judgements have rightly pointed out that India faces the risk of international arbitration and breaches of contract if genuine supplies are withheld. The Court also noted that Indian courts do not have jurisdiction to compel foreign countries to take certain steps or issue orders to them.[16]

Important Evolution in India–Israel Defence Trade Relations

The Amnesty report appears controversial as it obscures the above-mentioned categories as well as an important development in India–Israel defence relations—which is the changing nature of India’s role. India was once primarily an importer of Israeli defence technology. That relationship has evolved towards localised manufacturing, co-production, technology partnerships and integration into each other’s defence supply chains.

Some commentary in popular media and social media on India’s present defence supplies to Israel repeatedly invokes the 1999 Kargil War—as creating a reciprocal moral obligation. The history of that particular incident is more nuanced. Israel did provide India with some urgently required equipment and crucial technical assistance during the conflict, when USA-led sanctions and supply constraints complicated access to some Western-origin systems.[17]

Yet this was not military assistance in the sense of a free transfer—India paid for those systems and weapons, including for the Israeli Litening targeting pods. These pods were contracted in 1996, before the war, while Israeli technicians helped accelerate their integration into the IAF’s MIRAGE-2000 aircraft.[18] The significance of Kargil therefore does not lie in the creation of a future obligation on India to assist Israel in its military operations. The significance lies in the experience that subsequently deepened India–Israel defence cooperation beyond the sales of weapons to India.

Today, Israeli-origin systems such as assault rifles, guns, missiles, counter-drone systems, UAVs, radars, missile defence systems, etc., have increasingly acquired an Indian industrial footprint. More recently, Israeli and Indian officials have explicitly discussed moving beyond procurement towards co-development, co-production, resilient supply chains and deeper industrial cooperation. Indian localisation of Israeli-origin defence technology was already an established policy trajectory before October 2023. This transformation should not, however, be conflated with India becoming an extension of Israel’s defence industry.[19] Each side has its own commercial, political, technological and strategic interests.

Indian firms are increasingly driving localisation and technology development, with the ambition for the resulting products to be part of global rather than exclusively Israeli supply chains. But India is not yet capable of fully satisfying its defence requirements from indigenous sources. Therefore, India has legitimate reasons to continue its defence partnerships with friendly foreign countries, including Israel. Also, as long as Israel has the military support of the USA, arms transfer restrictions by other suppliers have no significant operational impact on the fighting capabilities of the Israeli military.[20]

The Narrative Angle and the Context Amnesty Underplays

There is another dimension to the controversial report that extends beyond the immediate legal debate: the perception value has become an increasingly important variable in defence markets. Credibility in defence markets is built incrementally through consistency, transparency and confidence under pressure. While technical requirements and trials govern formal procurement processes, perceptions can still play an indirect role by shaping broader strategic preferences, export potential, and prospective buyers’ confidence.[21] Hence, the wider politics of arms transfers warrants attention.

In June 2026, when questioned by a Financial Times journalist in Finland about India’s position on Russia, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar offered a pointed reminder to his European audience: “No European country has been attacked with Indian weapons. I wish I could say that for European weapons vis-à-vis India.”[22] The point is not to establish moral equivalence between different conflicts, but to challenge the assumption that arms transfers can be judged without considering the historical record of supplier-recipient relationships. The same principle applies to the present controversy. India’s defence exports to Israel can be scrutinised, but so should the broader international arms ecosystem.

In this context, Amnesty’s description of the November 2025 India–Israel MoU appears mischievous. It wrongly attributes intent from chronology. Section 5.3 of the Amnesty report presents this MoU on greater co-development and co-production, as evidence of deliberate Indian state policy to “deepen defence manufacturing cooperation with Israel at the very moment when Israel’s commission of genocide in Gaza has been extensively documented”.[23] This particular MoU has been under discussion for years and has no causal relationship with the current war.

Given the number of Indian sources cited in the report, it is strange that little attention has been paid to India’s rapidly evolving security requirements. The Pahalgam terrorist attack in April 2025 and the subsequent Operation Sindoor placed renewed emphasis on capabilities like drones, UAVs and missile defence in India.[24] These are areas in which Israel has longstanding expertise, and it has been an important technology and industrial partner—much Israeli equipment was used in the operation.[25] This chronology also does not establish that the November MoU resulted from Operation Sindoor. It thus reiterates that the existence of an agreement at a particular point in time doesn’t establish its intent—multiple other variables affect the signing of MoUs and defence deals. Correlation is not causation—this is a basic academic principle. A serious assessment should have examined the Indian security environment, procurement requirements and prior trajectory of bilateral defence cooperation rather than levelling accusations.

This is particularly relevant for India, whose defence industry is still establishing an international reputation. An unsubstantiated report does not merely enter a legal debate. Its framing can become part of the international narrative against Indian defence production and exports. Repeatedly describing Indian-origin products as contributing to unlawful conduct or human rights violations will have consequences beyond the specific Israel case. Indian defence exports are expanding rapidly, and Israeli companies themselves remain significant partners in India’s indigenous manufacturing ambitions.

If India allows its emerging defence industry to be defined internationally solely by allegations of foreign conflicts, it risks letting perceptions outrun the actual character of its defence exports. India’s response to such reports should therefore not be to dismiss scrutiny, but to strengthen internal processes, communicate more effectively what its defence industry actually produces and exports, and conduct regular studies on the global arms trade. India needs a credible export-control architecture, greater transparency and, equally importantly, a proactive international narrative demonstrating that ‘Made in India’ can mean both strategic capability and responsible defence production.

Conclusion

International reports are free to raise legitimate questions about India’s growing role in international defence supply chains. Still, their intentions, methodology, and conclusions require greater analytical caution than the reports themselves provide. In a globalised economy, the supply chains are complex and transnational. Therefore, the presence of components and military-use items within defence supply chains does not, by itself, establish their sources or end use. It also does not establish that India thereby incurred international legal responsibility for those operations. These are distinct propositions. The report’s central weakness lies in compressing these distinctions into a single narrative of complicity.

The same problem is evident in the treatment of chronology. A shipment made after 7 October 2023 does not necessarily represent a defence decision taken after 7 October. Long-term manufacturing contracts, established industrial partnerships and pre-existing supply arrangements complicate any attempt to infer intent from the date of delivery alone. Correlation in timing cannot substitute for evidence of causation. Most importantly, knowledge of a potential risk and legal responsibility for a particular act are not interchangeable concepts. These distinctions are essential if assessments of arms transfers are to move beyond advocacy and towards serious analysis.

None of this suggests that India should reject scrutiny of its defence exports. The transformation of India from a predominantly defence-importing country into an emerging producer, exporter and partner in international defence supply chains has been accompanied by a greater responsibility for export controls, end-use monitoring and transparent decision-making. As Indian companies become integrated into global production networks, the government is increasingly cognisant of the need to ensure that the exports are legally authorised and that credible systems exist to assess the risks associated with their eventual use.

For India, there is also a lesson. The country should not fully rely on foreign-origin practices, datasets, and other sources of information. Indian academia and research bodies need to develop their own datasets, charts, and ready-to-use information fact sheets, and to increase collaboration between researchers and government agencies involved in defence planning. In the future, India will need informed personnel to manage stronger export-control institutions, greater transparency wherever national-security considerations permit, systematic documentation of export-risk assessments, and independent research publications on its evolving global position. This will also need to be communicated domestically and internationally rather than allowing biased narratives surrounding India to be shaped entirely by external actors.

The real test for India is therefore not whether it can avoid controversy, but whether it can build an ecosystem that thrives on credibility, transparency and facts.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Manohar Parrikar IDSA or of the Government of India.

[1] “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”, Report, Amnesty International, 30 July 2026.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, p. 26.

[4] “Table 1. Imports of Major Arms by States in the Middle East, 2021–25”, SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, March 2026.

[5] “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”, no. 1, p. 9.

[6] India’s defence exports have reached more than 80 countries, according to an official press release. “The Defence Decade”, Backgrounder, Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 17 July 2026.

[7] “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”, no. 1, pp. 7, 10 and 26.

[8] See S. Samuel C. Rajiv, “The UK’s Arms Export Restrictions on Israel in Perspective”, Issue Brief, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), 11 October 2024.

[9] “Adani Defence & Aerospace and Elbit Systems Inaugurate India’s first private UAV manufacturing facility at Hyderabad”, ADANI, 13 December 2018.

[10] “JV with Israel for Production of Missiles”, Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, 22 August 2007.

[11] The complete list of offsets and companies is available at Defence Offset Management Wing, Ministry of Defence, Government of India.

[12] S. Samuel C. Rajiv, “Israel’s Rising Defence Exports Amidst Regional Conflicts”, Issue Brief, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), 14 July 2026.

[13] “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”, no. 1, Section 6.2.

[14] Ibid., Section 5.4.

[15] Ibid., Section 7.1, p. 34.

[16] “Ashok Kumar Sharma vs Union of India on 9 September, 2024”, Indian Kanoon, 9 September 2024.

[17] Ishan Srivastava, “How Kargil Spurred India to Design OWN GPS”, The Times of India, 5 April 2014.

[18] Adityaraj Kaul, “NDTV Exclusive: How Israel Quietly Armed India’s Jets to Win Kargil War Against Pakistan In 1999”, NDTV, 27 July 2026.

[19] Alex Winston, “Made in India: Inside the India-Israel Weapons Alliance Amnesty Wants Dismantled”, Jerusalem Post, 10 August 2026.

[20] S. Samuel C. Rajiv, “The UK’s Arms Export Restrictions on Israel in Perspective”, no. 8.

[21] Rahul Wankhede, “Beyond the Accidents: LCA Tejas and the Politics of Perception in Defence Markets”, Issue Brief, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), 22 April 2026.

[22] “War, Power and Diplomacy: S. Jaishankar on the World’s Biggest Challenges”, Brut India, 12 June 2026.

[23] “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel”, no. 1, p. 23.

[24] Anushka Sikka, “Operation Sindoor The Emergence of India’s Drone Doctrine”, Drone Federation of India, 23 May 2025; “Operation SINDOOR: The Rise of Aatmanirbhar Innovation in National Security”, Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, 14 May 2025.

[25] “Israel Extends Full Support to India’s Fight Against Terrorism, Backs Operation Sindoor”, NEWSONAIR, 15 May 2025; Sukhbir Kaur Minhas, “Mission Sudarshan Chakra and the India–Israel Special Strategic Partnership”, Issue Brief, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), 6 March 2026.