Alina Pucko,
Alexander Schwarz
Report
2026
Despite shifting media attention, Israel´s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza is ongoing.And so are German arms exports to Israel. Between October 2023 and June 2026, Germany licensed arms exports to Israel worth approximately €1.47 billion, including war weapons for about €528.9 million. After temporarily declining in the months surrounding the International Court of Justice’s April 2024 decision in Nicaragua v. Germany, licensing subsequently accelerated again. Since the Court’s Order of 30 April 2024 alone, Germany has authorized approximately €1.18 billion in additional arms exports to Israel.
This continuing licensing raises a fundamental legal problem. Arms export law is preventive law. Under German, European and international law, authorities are not required to wait until a particular German weapon has been traced to a particular unlawful attack. Nor is certainty about its future unlawful use required. The applicable rules require authorities to assess risk prospectively. Where there is an “overriding risk” under the Arms Trade Treaty or a “clear risk” under the EU Common Position that exported arms might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law, authorization must be refused. The Genocide Convention imposes an additional duty of prevention once a State is aware, or should be aware, of a serious risk of genocide.
Measured against these standards, the relevant risk thresholds were crossed long ago. While the German government briefly restricted new licenses in August 2025, the government never halted – or banned – the export of arms to Israel. Since October 2023, United Nations bodies, international courts and human rights organizations have documented extensive patterns of unlawful attacks, mass displacement, starvation, destruction of civilian infrastructure and other serious violations in Gaza. Despite UN experts calling for a halt to all arms exports to Israel since February 2024,despite multiple legal challenges to such exports, supported by ECCHR, and despite countless reports of Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the United Nations and human rights organizations,German arms exports to Israel persist, and – as media attention has waned and the German Federal Constitutional Court decision of 3 February 2026 failed to yield substantial legal review of Germany’s licensing regime - have risen sharply in recent months.
Germany’s licensing practice is particularly difficult to reconcile with the position it advanced before the ICJ itself. In April 2024, Germany defended its arms exports by emphasizing the preventive safeguards built into its export-control regime, the case-by-case assessment of applications, the possibility of refusing or revoking licenses, the sharp decline in authorization volumes and the limited number of licenses for weapons of war. The Court expressly referred to the circumstances existing “at present” when it declined to indicate provisional measures. The subsequent record undermines the factual and legal premises on which that defense rested. Licensing did not remain at the reduced levels presented to the Court. It increased substantially, even as evidence of serious international crimes accumulated. Germany therefore faces a contradiction of its own making: it cannot rely before the ICJ on a preventive, risk-based export-control system, while administering that system as though exports remain permissible.
This briefing documents that contradiction. After presenting its key findings (Section II), it explains the preventive legal framework governing arms exports and the applicable risk thresholds (Section III), gives an overview of Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law, which indicate that the legal thresholds for rejecting export licenses have long been met (Section IV), before continuing with a data-driven analysis of German arms exports to Israel since October 2023 (Section V). It also demonstrates how the German government fails to meet its transparency obligations on arms exports (Section VI) and provides an overview of the judicial challenges brought against such exports (Section VII).
