Mainstream WeeklyAugust 14, 2026
Amnesty International’s 42-page investigation, “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel,” released on 30 July 2026, sets out in minute detail what the Narendra Modi has decided to discuss for all of two years.
Amnesty has traced 2,596 shipments of weapons, ammunition, parts and components exported from India to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 30 November 2025 with domestic companies supplied at least 390,516 small arms parts for military-grade weapons, 564,970 parts of explosive ordnance including drone warheads and artillery shell casings, and 298 components of military vehicles, all flowing to large Israeli firms that are direct suppliers to the Israeli military.
Battlefield debris in Gaza has yielded Indian-made 155mm high-explosive shell casings and components of the SkyStriker loitering munition, the report notes, placing Indian manufacturing inside the physical wreckage of the campaign.
As of mid-2026, roughly three years after the escalation of conflict in October 2023, Gaza health authorities and monitoring groups report a Palestinian death toll exceeding 73,000 to 74,500, with thousands more remain missing under rubble and are presumed dead.
Ministry of Health data cited by UN OCHA and independent datasets, provide a clearer picture of the human cost, with children under 18 account for approximately 21,300 to 22,300 deaths, representing roughly 29–30 percent of the total, with 13,700 women, and 36,000 men killed.
These figures show women and children together making up roughly 45–50 percent of identified casualties in comprehensive lists because of strikes on residential buildings.
At least 270 to nearly 300 journalists and media workers have been killed, while over 1,700 health and humanitarian workers, including hundreds of UNRWA employees, have been shot point blank or have died of wounds sustained in the Israeli attacks.
Amnesty Secretary General Agnès Callamard said given the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures orders recognising a plausible risk of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, India cannot credibly claim ignorance that continued arms transfers carry a substantial risk of contributing to serious violations of international law.
The report names nine companies, including state-owned entities, and documents how India has moved beyond being a mere buyer of Israeli defence technology into co-production and supply-chain embedding.
Bengaluru’s Indo-MIM alone accounted for 1,273 shipments of weapons parts after October 2023, though Amnesty classified only a fraction as demonstrably military given the dual-use nature of many components.
There is a structural integration with domestic factories manufacturing for Israeli systems, jointly developing munitions, supply chains threaded into Israel’s war machine.
Amnesty said it wrote to the Indian government and to the named companies in June and July 2026 detailing its findings, bit neither responded.
India has not signed the Arms Trade Treaty, adopted in 2013, the first global, legally binding instrument regulating conventional arms transfers which requires states to assess the risk that a proposed export will facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, and to refuse the transfer where that risk is identified.
India abstained from the 2013 vote, expressing over concern the treaty’s perceived weakness on terrorism and non-state actors, and its view that the ATT is unbalanced, placing disproportionate obligations on importing states while leaving exporters free to impose unilateral restrictions, the same reasons Pakistan, too, has given for not signing the treaty.
Remaining outside the ATT leaves India without a standardised due diligence framework for arms exports, without a legal requirement to assess human rights risk before authorising a shipment, and without the international credibility that treaty membership would confer when accusations of complicity surface.
Amnesty’s report explicitly identifies this as a structural failure in India’s domestic legal architecture. specially no requirement for human rights due diligence, no transparency mechanism, no independent scrutiny of end use.
When the accusation is complicity in genocide, the absence of any of these safeguards removes the very grounds on which India might otherwise have rebutted the charge.
India has a long history of quiet defence cooperation with Israel, with successive Congress governments purchasing Israeli weapons systems while maintaining, in public, a rhetorical and often genuinely held commitment to Palestinian self-determination, to anti-colonial solidarity, and to the non-aligned tradition that placed India rhetorically alongside the Global South.
India voted with Palestine at the United Nations, recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1974, among the first non-Arab states to do so.
The defence relationship with Israel existed, but it existed beneath a foreign policy that still claimed international law and Third World solidarity as its compass.
The Modi government has moved from systematic support for Palestinian positions at the United Nations to hedging, abstention, and silence, even as defence integration with Israel has deepened to the point of co-production and embedded supply chains.
Modi has described Benjamin Netanyahu as a “dear friend,” a description that has not altered since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister in late 2024 over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The rhetorical commitment to Palestine has not been replaced by active material participation, publicly unacknowledged, in the machinery that Amnesty and the ICJ have separately linked to a plausible genocide.
Congress leaders have called this shift an abdication of morality, but what has been lost is India’s claim to a distinctive voice in international affairs, one built over seven decades on the proposition that a nation shaped by colonial subjugation understood, and would resist, the machinery of occupation and dispossession elsewhere.
The details of shipment-level trade data, HS codes, and battlefield debris, assembled by an organisation India cannot dismiss as hostile propaganda without dismissing the International Court of Justice alongside it, exposes India to questioning not only by Amnesty but many of its allies in the Muslim world.
The government’s likely response will be silence followed by denial followed by a claim that defence exports are governed by law and subject to end-user certification.
Amnesty’s report anticipates and answers that defence directly, saying that the absence of any statutory human rights due diligence requirement in India’s arms export regime, combined with India’s continued refusal to join the Arms Trade Treaty, means no such certification carries the evidentiary weight the government will claim for it.