WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to the Zionist regime since the war in Gaza began and led to escalating conflict around West Asia, according to a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project, released on the anniversary of Hamas’ operation on the Zionist regime.
An additional $4.86 billion has gone into stepped-up U.S. military operations in the region since Oct. 7, 2023, researchers said in findings first provided to The Associated Press. That includes the costs of a Navy-led campaign to quell strikes on commercial shipping by Yemeni forces, who are carrying them out in solidarity with Palestinians.
The report — completed before the Zionist regime opened a second front, this one against Hezbollah resistance movement in Lebanon, in late September — is one of the first tallies of estimated U.S. costs as the Biden administration backs the Zionist regime in its aggression in Gaza and Lebanon.
The financial toll is on top of the cost in human lives. The Zionist regime’s genocidal campaign has killed nearly 42,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry.
At least 1,400 people in Lebanon have been killed since the regime greatly expanded its strikes in that country in late September.
The financial costs were calculated by Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has assessed the full costs of U.S. wars since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and fellow researchers William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler.
The Zionist regime — a protege of the United States since its 1948 founding — is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in history, getting $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, the report says.
Even so, the $17.9 billion spent since Oct. 7, 2023, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is by far the most military aid sent to the regime in one year. The U.S. committed to providing billions in military assistance to the regime and Egypt each year when they signed their 1979 U.S.-brokered peace treaty, and an agreement since the Obama administration set the annual amount for Israel at $3.8 billion through 2028.