The reports, which were released by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, found that without US weapons and money, Israel wouldn’t have been able to sustain its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, start a war with Iran, or repeatedly bomb Yemen.
The report’s findings are also backed up by analysts who stated that Israel’s wars in the besieged and bombardment enclave and in the wider region could not have continued without US financial and diplomatic support.
Israel’s war on Gaza alone has killed more than 67,150 people and wounded another 169,700 since October 2023.
Thousands are still believed to be under the Gaza Strip’s ruins, while Israel has killed dozens in strikes on Yemen and killed more than 1,000 people when it attacked Iran in June.
It increased raids in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; killed over 4,000 people in Lebanon while eviscerating swaths of villages; invaded and occupied Lebanese and Syrian land.
But Israel couldn’t have maintained these wars without constant US support, researchers found.
“Given the scale of current and future spending, it is clear the [Israeli army] could not have done the damage they have done in Gaza or escalated their military activities throughout the region without US financing, weapons, and political support,” read the report – US Military Aid and Arms Transfers to Israel, October 2023–September 2025 – by William D Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Hartung’s report was jointly released by the Costs of War and the Quincy Institute, which describes itself as promoting “ideas that move US foreign policy away from endless war, toward military restraint and diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace”.
Hartung’s findings and a companion report by Linda J Bilmes, an expert on budgeting and public finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, found that the US spent “a total of $31.35 – $33.77 billion and counting” since October 7, 2023 in military aid to Israel and in “US military operations in the region”.
They show how US support for Israel has helped it continue to wage war on multiple fronts for two years, and analysts backed up the reports’ conclusions.
The US has long been Israel’s most fervent backer. When it comes to US foreign aid, Israel is the largest annual recipient (at around $3.3bln yearly) and the largest cumulative one (more than $150bln until 2022).
Over decades and despite the changing of administrations, US support for Israel was constant.
Hartung’s report specifically mentions that the administrations of both US President Joe Biden and his successor, Donald Trump, committed tens of billions of dollars in arms sales agreements, including services and weapons that will be paid for in the coming years.
However, many Americans have started to move away from the mainstream position on Israel. In recent months, as scholars declared the Zionist regime’s actions in Gaza a genocide, public perception of Israel in the US has severely degraded.
This drop is also true among American Jews. According to a recent Washington Post poll, four in 10 US Jews believe Israel is committing genocide, while more than 60 percent say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.
A new poll from The New York Times and Siena University also found that nearly two years into the war in Gaza, American support for Israel has undergone a seismic reversal, with large shares of voters expressing starkly negative views about the Israeli government’s management of the conflict.
Disapproval of the war appears to have prompted a striking reassessment by American voters of their broader sympathies in the decades-old conflict in the region, with slightly more voters siding with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on the occupied territories in October 2023, American voters broadly sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians, with 47 percent siding with Israel and 20 percent with Palestinians. In the new poll, 34 percent said they sided with Israel and 35 percent with Palestinians. Thirty-one percent said they were unsure or backed both equally.
A majority of American voters now oppose sending additional economic and military aid to Israel, a stunning reversal in public opinion since the October attacks. About six out of 10 voters said that Israel should end its military campaign, even if the remaining Israeli hostages were not released or Hamas was not eliminated. And 40 percent of voters said Israel was intentionally killing civilians in Gaza, nearly double the number of voters who agreed with that statement in the 2023 poll.
Analysts believe that could have a big impact going forward for anyone in US politics.
In addition to US public criticism of Israel’s actions in the Middle East, analysts say figures like the ones shown by the Costs of War Project’s reports may also draw ire from Americans frustrated by where their tax dollars are going.
