India has continued to supply Israel with weapons despite a grave risk that they could be used in what Amnesty International describes as an ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organisation said in a new report. Continuing those exports, it said, could expose India to the risk of complicity.
The report documents how the Indian government built a close and profitable partnership with Israel’s defence sector, tracing the relationship as a supply arrangement rather than a series of one-off transactions.
The legal question behind the finding
The core of the argument is not commercial but legal. International standards governing arms transfers rest on the principle that an exporting state must assess, before a transfer goes ahead, whether what it sends is likely to be used in serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law — and must withhold the transfer where that risk is substantial. The obligation attaches to what the exporter knew, or should have known, at the time of the transfer, not to what emerges afterwards.
That is the framework in which human rights organisations have examined supply chains running to parties in armed conflicts, and it is the framework Amnesty applies to India here. The responsibility at issue is that of the state itself, which is distinct from the individual criminal liability that attaches to named people before a court.
Building on an earlier conclusion
Amnesty International’s earlier work on Gaza concluded that Israel’s conduct there amounts to genocide. The new report starts from that conclusion and asks what it means for a state that keeps shipping weapons and ammunition to a government against which the finding was made. India is better known internationally as one of the world’s largest buyers of arms than as a supplier, and the report sets out the other side of that trade: a defence relationship in which goods move towards Israel as well as away from it.
The documentation lands amid broader scrutiny of countries that export arms or military components to Israel, a line of inquiry that has extended over the past two years from the largest suppliers to states whose role has drawn less attention.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
