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arms embargo
Canada, Stop Using the US to Launder Complicity With the Gaza Genocide
Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.
Jan 11, 2026
For decades, Canada has carefully cultivated a global reputation for principle, human rights, and moral clarity. However, that image is now cracking, and cracking fast. For too long, Canada has cloaked its inaction and complicity, rather spectacularly, behind political correctness. But as the global crises grow more brutal—and more visible—it has become harder for Canada to maintain this facade.
Canadians and people around the world are catching on to the gap between what the country claims to stand for and what it actually does. That gap is just impossible to ignore when it comes to the situation in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 80,000 Palestinians—and that figure represents only the confirmed deaths, excluding those trapped beneath the rubble. Experts have estimated that nearly 600,000 total Palestinians have lost their lives, including thousands of children, and nearly 2 million more have been displaced, an overwhelming portion of the strip’s population.
United Nations experts and international human rights organizations have increasingly raised alarms, calling this horrific massacre what it is: a genocide. Gaza now lies beneath 68 million tons of rubble, roughly the weight of 186 Empire State Buildings—enough debris to spread 215 pounds over every square inch of Manhattan. Meanwhile, the United States continues to ship to Israel, and Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to fuel the violence unabated, its factories producing fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that move through US channels directly into the assault.
The latest Arms Embargo Now report documents hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made fighter jet components, explosives, and propellants flowing through US facilities to Israel. Shipping data, contract records, ports of exit, and delivery timelines confirm that Canadian military goods are directly sustaining Israel’s assault on Gaza. Between late 2023 and mid-2025, over 360 shipments of Canadian aircraft parts reached Lockheed Martin's F-35 assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of commercially available shipping data revealed that at least 34 shipments were forwarded from US facilities directly to Israeli military bases and defense firms. Canadian explosives and propellants, including the M31A2 triple-base propellant and TNT, transshipped through the Port of Saguenay, Quebec, were routed through US munitions plants to produce bombs and artillery shells used in Gaza.
Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada?
The report further shows that many of these controlled military components were transported from Canada to the United States as cargo on commercial passenger flights, departing from major airports such as Toronto Pearson and Montréal-Trudeau. These components support both new aircraft production and ongoing maintenance, keeping Israeli F-35s operational during the Gaza assault, while the use of civilian airlines blurs the line between ordinary passenger travel and an active military supply chain. Every shipment appears to flow through a calculated, politically engineered pipeline fueling war.
This evidence exposes a stark truth: Public assurances by Canadian officials are incompatible with reality. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly promised that Canada would not allow “any form of arms or parts of arms” to reach Gaza, directly or indirectly. Her successor, Anita Anand, repeated similar commitments. Yet the shipments continue. Canada has not stopped sending arms; it has simply outsourced accountability.
The government’s defense relies on the so-called US Loophole: Military exports to the United States are exempt from Canada’s permit requirements and human rights assessments. Once in US hands, Canada claims no responsibility for where the arms go next. However, international law does not vanish because weapons cross a border. The Arms Trade Treaty prohibits authorizing transfers when there is a substantial risk of facilitating serious violations of humanitarian law. Knowledge, foreseeability, and contribution still matter.
The pattern of misrepresentation is clear. From December 2023 to January 2024, officials, including former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and GAC Assistant Deputy Minister Alexandre Lévêque, claimed no arms exports or permits had been issued to Israel, a statement contradicted by nearly $30 million in new export permits. Early 2024 saw a pivot to “non-lethal” exports, with night-vision goggles and protective gear cited to obscure lethal shipments of bomb accessories and explosives. Parliamentary motions and public statements claiming a halt to arms exports were largely symbolic, leaving the vast majority of existing permits intact.
By 2024-2025, claims that exports were restricted to “defensive” uses, such as the Iron Dome, or would not reach Gaza, were impossible to verify and did not prevent Canadian-made components from being incorporated into Israeli munitions. The government’s narrative meandered endlessly, offering Kafkaesque explanations that dissolved accountability into legalistic semantics.
If Canada were truly innocent, it would have promptly and publicly refuted the findings of the Arms Embargo Now report. Instead, it has responded with silence. Even after Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan introduced Bill C-233 in September 2025 to close the US loophole and impose meaningful parliamentary oversight on arms exports, the bill has been left to languish untouched. This legislation offers a straightforward safeguard to prevent Canadian weapons and components from being routed through the United States to fuel conflicts abroad, yet the government refuses to move.
If this were merely bureaucratic oversight, and if sending arms indirectly to Israel were not the objective, why has there been no momentum on a measure so clearly aligned with transparency and human rights? Why is Canada so determined to continue funneling weapons parts and ammunition to the US, unquestioningly, even as it allows itself to be used as an accessory to Israel’s genocide and deepens dependence on a country that has openly entertained annexing Canada? And why do weapon components and ammunition continue to flow even as Canadian representatives and humanitarian delegates are barred from entering the occupied West Bank, prevented from witnessing conditions on the ground themselves?
At this point, one can only wonder how much longer Canada’s moral facade can plausibly endure. As Aldous Huxley once observed, “The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.” This appears to be the goal here. The government has offered no coherent defense, only theatrical explanations in which responsibility dissolves into process and legality is reduced to paperwork. There is no counterstrategy, no rebuttal, and no attempt at persuasion. There is only silence, complexity, and delay.
Perhaps the unspoken calculation is that this response will be enough. After all, when public schools report alarming declines in reading and comprehension skills, critical engagement becomes harder to sustain. If citizens struggle to parse policy documents or follow supply-chain evidence, denial need not be convincing; it merely needs to be exhausting. In such an environment, ignorance becomes not a failure of governance, but a quiet line of defense.
In light of all this, recognition of the State of Palestine now reads like a scripted apology: Yes, we see your suffering, we hear your cries, but don’t worry, we’ll keep arming your oppressor through the US. Meanwhile, Canadian factories quietly churn out fighter jet parts, explosives, and munitions that fuel Israel’s assault on Gaza. As Joseph Heller observed in Catch-22, “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.” It is a brutal reminder that, regardless of what the government says, Canada’s military industry has reduced Palestinian lives in Gaza to expendable instruments, sacrificed to preserve contracts, alliances, and profit. Words without action are meaningless; they are a costume of virtue, while the violence continues unabated.
Canada’s reputation cannot survive on statements alone. It rests on the belief that credible evidence of mass harm would prompt action. That belief no longer holds. The facts are documented. The loopholes are exposed. The silence is deliberate.
History will not remember Canada for its statements or parliamentary motions. It will remember the arms it allowed to flow, the civilians killed with its components, and the moral compromise it has embraced. Canada’s rhetoric of principle is a veneer, one that is cracking as a majority of Canadians now demand recognition of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Behind this veneer lies complicity, deliberate and undeniable.
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Military Budget Bill Would Ramp Up Israel Aid to Fill In 'Gaps' When Other Countries Impose Embargoes Over Genocide
The House Armed Services Committee said in September that the measure "combats antisemitism."
Dec 09, 2025
A little-reported provision of the latest military spending bill would direct the US to create a plan to fill the "gaps" for Israel whenever other nations cut off arms shipments in response to its acts of genocide in Gaza.
As Prem Thakker reported Monday for Zeteo, the measure is "buried" more than 1,000 pages into the more than 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is considered by lawmakers to be “must-pass" legislation and contains a record $901 billion in total spending.
Republicans are shepherding the bill through the US House of Representatives, where—as is the case with most NDAAs—it is expected to pass on Wednesday with Democratic support, even as some conservative budget hardliners refuse to back it, primarily over its $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Since the genocide began following Hamas' attack on October 7, 2023, the US has provided more than $21.7 billion to Israel, including hundreds of millions that have been supplied through NDAAs.
The new NDAA includes at least another $650 million to Israel, an increase of $45 million from the previous one, even though this is the first such bill to be introduced since the "ceasefire" that went into effect in October. This aid from the Pentagon comes on top of the $3.3 billion already provided through the State Department budget.
But this NDAA also contains an unprecedented measure. It calls for the “continual assessment of [the] impact of international state arms embargoes on Israel and actions to address defense capability gaps."
The NDAA directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to assess “the scope, nature, and impact on Israel’s defense capabilities of current and emerging arms embargoes, sanctions, restrictions, or limitations imposed by foreign countries or by international organizations,” and “the resulting gaps or vulnerabilities in Israel’s security posture.”
As Drop Site News explains, "this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region."
"The point of this assistance, to be clear, is to make up for any identified insufficiencies Israel may have due to other countries' embargoing it as a result of its ongoing genocide in Palestine," Thakker wrote.
A similar provision appeared in a September version of the NDAA, which the House Armed Services Committee praised because it supposedly “combats antisemitism"—explicitly conflating a bias against Jewish people with weapons embargoes that countries have imposed to stop Israel from continuing its routine, documented human rights violations in Gaza.
Among the nations that have cut off weapons sales to Israel are Japan, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, other major backers, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have imposed partial freezes on certain weaponry.
While official estimates from the Gaza Ministry of Health place the number of dead from Israel's military campaign at over 70,000, with more than 170,000 wounded, an independent assessment last month from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Center for Demographic Studies in Spain found that the death toll “likely exceeds 100,000." This finding mirrored several other studies that have projected the true death toll to be much higher than what official estimates show.
Embargoes against Israel have been called for by a group of experts mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, numerous human rights organizations, including the leading Israeli group B’Tselem, have said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has amounted to genocide.
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Why I Am Joining the People’s Hunger Strike for Gaza
I have joined the hunger strike in grief at the annihilation of Gaza, and to protest the use of my tax dollars to transform the Gaza Strip into a graveyard for its people and international law.
Sep 25, 2025
On September 25 I will begin a weeklong water-only fast as part of The People’s Hunger Strike that was launched outside the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building in Boston on September 4.
Its goals are to raise consciousness about the deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza and to pressure Massachusetts senators, whose offices are in that building, to sponsor a version of the House "Block the Bombs" bill (HR 3565) that would stop the US from sending Israel the kind of high-impact weaponry being used against civilians in the Gaza Strip in violation of international law.
The Horror of Forced Starvation
The People’s Hunger Strike is the brainchild of a Boston physician Miriam Komaromy. She had not previously been actively involved in organizing for Palestine. But “when forced starvation was imposed on the Gaza population it brought me up short,” she told me. “I said this cannot be. The reality of parents starving and watching their child starve to death—I couldn’t bear it.”
Responding to a Palestinian call urging people of conscience around the world to join a solidarity hunger strike initiated in the West Bank, Dr. Komaromy reached out to members of Boston’s Doctors against Genocide and Healthcare Workers for Palestine-Boston as well as the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Soon they had numerous cosponsoring groups supporting the planned hunger strike, and some 35 people had pledged to undertake one-week fasts.
Many of those who joined the action were new to the issue; others had long been involved in organizing for Palestinian rights. All were affected by what Jeannie—a hunger striker whose Irish heritage taught her something about deliberately manufactured famine—described in the following way: “For almost two years, we’ve seen the images of the displaced, whose homes, schools, hospitals, water, and entire society have been bombed, as they walk through the rubble seeking food and shelter. The woman whose milk has dried up screaming with grief over her dead baby; the face of a skeletal child, crying and holding out an empty pot; a father weeping over the shrouded corpses of his entire family. These images don’t stop coming.”
The Gaza I knew
Those images and the unfolding genocide that has been meticulously documented by human rights organizations including Israeli groups, genocide scholars and, on September 16, the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry, have overwhelmed me. I have a personal relationship with the Gaza Strip going back to my first visit in 1988 as part of a human rights delegation when Israel was using “force, might, and beatings” (Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s phrase) to suppress the first Intifada, an unarmed uprising of the entire civil society.
"We have a duty to do all that we can to stop the genocide that is funded and promoted by our government.”
During the more than a dozen visits I subsequently made to Gaza as head of a foundation supporting its mental health services, I made many friends and experienced this tiny piece of land as a place of extraordinary hospitality. I saw firsthand how its population was demonized by Israel, imprisoned in what has been called an "open air prison" since 2007, and subjected to repeated sustained military bombardments well before the seismic events of October 7, 2023.
I have joined the hunger strike in grief at the annihilation of Gaza, and to protest the use of my tax dollars to transform the Gaza Strip into a graveyard for its people and international law.
Our Duty to Stop Genocide
Several people I work with in the Boston-based Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine have also joined the fast. Judy, who recently finished her week without food, says she fasted because “I am angry and heartbroken watching the people of Gaza endure forced starvation and seeing what it does to their bodies, spirit, and to their future. I joined the strike to pressure our government to stop sending Israel weapons.”
Jude, who is in treatment for cancer herself, hopes to personalize and make visible the impact of the Israeli-created famine and the long-term harm it is causing. She adds: “I can retreat from this strike at the first sign of harm. This is not true for our counterparts in Gaza who are exhausted; without food, water, medicine, or shelter; and under constant attack. We have a duty to do all that we can to stop the genocide that is funded and promoted by our government.”
Kathy hopes that the hunger strike will send a loud message to her elected representative, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who has not signed onto the House "Block the Bombs" bill despite “countless calls from her constituents over the last two years concerning the weapons the US has sent to Israel with Massachusetts tax dollars. The result has been the extermination of entire generational families living in Gaza, as well as the killing and maiming of massive numbers of civilians including babies, children, courageous journalists, and doctors. We want her to stand with the Congressional Progressive Caucus which has endorsed the Block the Bombs Act.”
It is too late to save the lives of more than 65,000 Palestinians, many slaughtered with US weapons and 83% of them civilians according to the Israeli army’s own data. It is too late to bring back the hundreds of children who have already died from forced starvation. But we hope that the hunger strike will amplify our message: Let Gaza Live!
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