"Shipping Giant Maersk Violated Spanish Embargo on Sending Military Goods to Israel, Researchers Say", 4 November 2024

In late October, yet another video from Gaza showed dozens of Palestinian men rounded up, blindfolded, and hauled away by Israeli soldiers...the Palestinian hostages...were crammed inside the cargo bed of an Israeli military truck.

The vehicle appears to be an Oshkosh M1085 5-Ton Long Cargo medium tactical vehicle.

Over the last year, the Israeli military has received at least 100 of Oshkosh armored vehicles like the one in the video. They arrived on vessels operated by the commercial shipping and logistics giant A.P. Moller Maersk...

Images of Palestinians crushed by Israeli tanks and trucks are now grimly familiar to anyone paying attention to the ongoing Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

Maersk’s role in shipping the Oshkosh armored vehicles came to light as part of a new investigation from researchers with 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 Israel’s genocidal war began last year.

The findings...reveal the significant role that Maersk...has played in delivering military goods to Israel, including tanks and other armored vehicles or their parts, aircraft components, armored plates, parts for artillery systems, and many hundreds of shipments that are unidentified or unspecified “military equipment.”

Analyzing shipment export data from over 2,000 shipments over the last year, the researchers report that they were able to reveal a commercial supply chain rife with materiel bound for use in Israel’s assault on Gaza...

Maersk did not respond to a request for comment...

Interglobal Forwarding Services...operates as the U.S.-based freight forwarder for the Israeli Ministry of Defense — that is, the company that organizes the movement of shipments.

The use of freight forwarders allows the Israeli military to obscure from the public the original manufacturer of the military goods, with only the freight forwarder listed as the “shipper.”...

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

In addition to the traceable shipments, data reviewed by the researchers reveals vast amounts of unidentified and uncategorized military cargo sent from the U.S. to the Israeli military on Maersk container ships...

Over 6 million pounds of cargo have been shipped to the Israeli military by Maersk with contents “unidentified” in shipping logs, without any specific content code or listing of a specific manufacturer as the sender. Only Interglobal Forward Services is listed...