"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. In the footage...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...

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 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. The researchers said the available shipping data suggests that Maersk ships violated a Spanish embargo policy by transiting through the port of Algeciras.

The Spanish embargo bars cargo ships carrying weapons that could be used for war crimes from making calls in Spanish ports; in May, the foreign ministry said the rule would apply to military goods bound for Israel. Since then, Maersk ships with military goods headed for Israel...frequently transited through Algeciras, one of the largest ports in Europe, said Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International researchers. (Maersk did not respond to a request for comment.)

In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, a Spanish foreign ministry spokesperson said, “The MFA has rejected and will continue to reject all requests to call at Spanish ports of vessels carrying military material and having Israel as final destination.”

“We are studying the information with those ministries responsible for the control and entry of goods into national territory to clarify what happened,” the spokesperson said. “If the information is confirmed, all necessary measures will be taken. The MFA has made and continues to make repeated appeals to tighten controls so as to ensure strict compliance with its decisions on this matter.”...

Calling for Spanish authorities to search the vessels and enforce the ban, the researchers said data shows Maersk has made almost 1,000 shipments of goods to the Israeli military through Algeciras since the embargo announcement...

“This is an American genocide, financed by U.S. military sales and manufactured by U.S. arms companies,” said Kaleem Hawa of the Palestinian Youth Movement, a lead researcher on the Maersk campaign. “Theirs is a cumulative system; of arms components flowing to the U.S. manufacturers, of weapons flowing to the Israeli military, and of goods from stolen land flowing out of Palestine — every chain of complicity that sustains the Israeli project of mass death depends on logistics companies like Maersk.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement...launched the “Mask Off Maersk” campaign last June to shed light on the shipping firm’s role in facilitating the circulation of materiel deployed in Israel’s assaults on Palestine and Lebanon....

Though it is often unclear what materiel Maersk ships, the company has been contracted by the Pentagon to transport weapons to Israel. Information on Maersk shipments to the Israeli military on behalf of the American government is hard to uncover, the researchers said, due to the limited information available to the public about the nature of the shipments...

Interglobal Forwarding Services, an American firm incorporated in New Jersey, 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.” Only through decoding data from bills of lading — the term for shipping contracts and documents — were researchers able to trace the contents to manufacturers of military goods.

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.)

According to the researchers, several of the shipments’ listed contents correspond with “at least three” arms deals made between the U.S. and Israel in the last year...

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.

“While most records in the dataset contain descriptions of the items contained within each shipment, a substantial number of records omit any such information,” the researchers said in a statement. “Unidentified cargo — shipments with entirely blank descriptions of their contents in their respective bills of lading — accounted for almost 35 percent of all observed shipments since the beginning of the war on Gaza.”

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...