Canadian companies, with the approval of the Canadian government, are supplying military equipment for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The proof is incontrovertible. On July 29, 2025, researchers revealed that Canadian companies have shipped hundreds of thousands of bullets to Israel, as well as cartridges, fighter jet components, and more. One shipment alone—from just two months ago, in April 2025—sent 175,000 bullets to Israel. In the time since those bullets arrived, Israeli and American soldiers have killed over a thousand Palestinians as they line up for food at “aid distribution points.”
Such shipments, of course, fly in the face of the Canadian government’s public messaging on the issue, which continues to claim that it has an arms embargo against Israel—a country that is currently facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court and whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is subject to an international arrest warrant for crimes against humanity. The official line from the federal government is that they have not approved any arms sales to Israel since January 2024 and are respecting a March 2024 parliamentary motion that committed Canada to halt weapons sales to Israel.
This new research, conducted by the Palestinian Youth Movement, World Beyond War, and the Arms Embargo Now campaign, demonstrates that Canada continues to supply weapons to Israel. The Canadian government approved a flurry of arms sales to Israeli weapons companies—primarily Elbit Systems—between October and December 2023. Many of those contracts continue to be rolled out, and the weapons continue to flow from Canadian factories into the hands of Israeli soldiers as they commit acts of genocide.
The federal government has the power to suspend such approvals. It has done so in the recent past, such as when it suspended a shipment of artillery cartridges that a Quebec-based factory was planning to ship to Israel via the United States. Both domestic and international law clearly require Canada to halt arms exports to Israel. Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act (EIPA) outlines how the government must prevent exports that “commit or facilitate” serious human rights violations or “serious acts of violence against women and children,” both of which unambiguously apply to Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza.
Israeli military operations had killed at least 55,000 people according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than half of them children, and wounded nearly 130,000 by mid-June 2025. Other estimates, including by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, place the estimate much higher, in the hundreds of thousands when including indirect deaths, such as those from disease and hunger. A UN commission found that Israeli airstrikes, shelling, burning, and controlled demolitions have destroyed more than 90 per cent of schools and university buildings across Gaza. Israeli airstrikes continue to kill close to 100 people a day, on top of those who die from forced starvation.
A lack of food and clean water, along with accumulating garbage, have driven the population into a tiny section of Gaza. Images of starving children filling Gaza’s few surviving hospitals have horrified the world. Sporadic aid distribution points established by the shady Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) are routinely attacked by Israeli Defence Forces and fund members. More than a thousand people have been killed at these “shooting galleries” that are otherwise the only source of scarce food for starving Palestinians.
These killings are not incidental; they are a planned effort by the Israeli government to demoralize Palestinians, with the aim of forcing them to leave Gaza or die. Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which helped develop the GHF, also worked on a cost estimate for relocating up to a quarter of Palestinians so that the GHF’s Israeli business backers could redevelop Gaza as a crypto-forward free trade zone. Far-right politicians and Israeli settlers discussed the plan again last week as BCG and the Tony Blair Institute, another dabbler in the dystopian vision, were running for the exit. On July 27, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu claimed “there is no starvation in Gaza.”
International responses to the Gaza genocide, to date, have been so tepid as to appear delusional, fearful of backlash from Israel or the United States, or simply complicit in the violence. In May 2025, the European Union voted to review its free trade agreement with Israel based on concerns that the Israeli government was violating human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The United Kingdom simultaneously suspended trade negotiations with Israel and imposed additional sanctions on settler outposts in the West Bank.
French President Emmanuel Macron stuck his neck out a little further last week by officially recognizing Palestinian statehood. Reports of the move, which was ridiculed by President Trump and his UN representative Mike Huckabee, included statements from French diplomats suggesting that Canada and other countries approached to join the French move were too worried about upsetting the Trump administration to follow through.
If true, this would be a truly shameful showing for Canada. For international law to mean anything, states must feel duty bound to uphold it. The severity of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is beyond doubt, as is Israel’s obvious responsibility for causing and perpetuating it.
What is the federal government afraid of? Not getting a good trade deal with the Trump administration? It is not clear there is such a thing, based on recent “deals” announced with the European Union and Japan. What “deal” would possibly warrant shutting up about a genocide? Posterity will forget Trump sooner than it forgets or forgives what is transpiring in Gaza.
Time to escalate
So what should Canada do? On top of really, actually banning all weapons sales to Israel—as the government promised—Canada should take further actions against the Netenyahu government commensurate with the scale of intentional human rights violations in the Palestinian Territories. These could include:
A comprehensive, two-way arms embargo. Canada must cancel existing arms contracts to Israel in addition to refusing to sign new export approvals. But beyond that, Canada needs to also stop purchasing weapons from Israeli arms companies—weapons those companies explicitly market as having been “battle-tested” on captive populations of Palestinians. In all cases, this must also close the “U.S. loophole” that allows companies to ship arms to Israel via transit points in the U.S. It must also include transit shipments—that is, preventing the transit, docking and servicing of any international vessels carrying military goods to Israel.
Terminate or suspend the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA). Even before Israel’s genocide began, CIFTA was already violating international law by allowing for goods manufactured in the occupied territories to be labeled as “Made in Israel”. Canada must immediately suspend the agreement, or scrap it entirely.
A 100 per cent tax on outward Canadian investment. A number of important institutional investors, including pension funds, have major investments in Israeli defence firms and companies producing dual-use technologies or providing services integral to the occupation and genocide in Gaza. These investments, according to a recent UN report, are a key part of the “economy of genocide.” Quebec’s Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, which manages the province’s public pension funds, has almost $9.6 billion worth of investments in the Israeli companies that the report specifically names as key actors in the genocide.
The federal government should implement an immediate and punitive tax on those investments, covering 100 per cent of any returns on investment, as a way to discourage such investments. Any recuperated funds should be sent towards UN-managed aid to Gaza.
Contract reviews and federal procurement bans. The federal government should review all federal contracts with the goal of removing Israeli goods and services, and prohibiting Israeli firms from bidding on new federal contracts, including by Crown corporations. No federal funding should go towards Israeli companies that are complicit in genocide—which is the vast majority of the major Israeli firms capable of bidding on international contracts. Various levels of government have spent the past months taking action against American companies due to Donald Trump’s threats, by doing things like removing U.S. liquor from shelves and cancelling contracts with Elon Musk’s companies. They should do the same for Israeli firms.
Break diplomatic ties with Israel, open them with Palestine. The Canadian government should immediately withdraw all diplomats from Israel and expel all Israeli diplomats from Canada, whose primary purpose in this country is running cover for Israel’s genocide, as flagged this week by the Dutch intelligence agency. Any domestic organization with any level of affiliation with the Israeli government should have their status reviewed and revoked when possible. Canada should follow up by opening diplomatic ties with Palestine, beginning with formally recognizing a Palestinian state, as France has already done.
Other countries are already taking action—why isn’t Canada?
In July 2025, a group of over 30 countries—called the “Hague Group”—convened in Bogota, Colombia for an emergency meeting to end the genocide in Palestine. Canada was not one of them. Out of that conference, a smaller group of initial signatories signed onto an agreement to take unprecedented material pressure against Israel.
The signatory states—eight in total, with more potentially signing on by September—agreed to take many of the steps outlined in this article, including comprehensive arms embargoes, blocking transit shipments, reviewing public contracts, preventing investment in genocide-linked firms, and actively supporting the international courts that seek to bring Israeli war criminals to justice. Such measures are the first of their kind against Israel, and represent the most concerted effort to date to stop Israel’s genocide using the existing mechanisms of the global order.
The stakes of success are high, even beyond Palestine. If states are unable to prevent a blatant, live-streamed genocide of a captive civilian population using the trade and legal mechanisms of the international order—an order that Canada describes itself as a defender of—then that order risks collapsing entirely. The only governing principle left in its wake will be military strength—a return of the era of competing empires, now in the era of nuclear weapons.
The best time for Canada to have implemented these measures would have been in the beginning of Israel’s genocide, when respected genocide scholars (including Israeli scholars like Raz Segal) recognized it for what it is. The second best time, as ever, is right now.
