More than seven decades after the adoption of the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions, the world faces an unsettling question: can a nation remain morally neutral while continuing to arm a war that has produced one of the gravest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century? The question extends to every state that continues to supply weapons, ammunition, and military components to Israel or provide diplomatic protection for its leaders despite mounting evidence of catastrophic civilian suffering in Gaza.
India has now entered this global debate. A recent Amnesty International investigation alleges that Indian public and private defence companies exported at least 2,596 consignments of arms, ammunition and military components to Israel between October 2023 and November 2025. According to Amnesty, many of these transfers continued even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in January 2024, found a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention. India has rejected Amnesty’s allegations, maintaining that all exports comply with its domestic laws and international obligations.
Whether India has crossed the legal threshold of complicity is ultimately for competent judicial bodies to determine. Yet Amnesty’s findings raise a larger question that no democracy committed to the rule of law can afford to ignore: what obligations do states bear when credible allegations of genocide and grave violations of international humanitarian law are already before the world’s highest court?
Gaza: Beyond Statistics
The Gaza genocide has produced devastation unprecedented in recent decades. Entire neighbourhoods have been levelled. Hospitals, universities, schools, refugee camps and places of worship have suffered extensive destruction. Millions have been displaced repeatedly, while shortages of food, clean water, medicines and electricity have pushed the territory towards famine and public health collapse.
According to figures cited by Amnesty International from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, by April 2026 more than 73,410 Palestinians, including 20,402 children, had been killed and over 172,000 injured since October 2023. Thousands more are believed to remain buried beneath collapsed buildings. Amnesty has characterised these events as constituting genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a conclusion categorically rejected by Israel.
Beyond these numbers lies a deeper tragedy. Educational institutions, medical facilities, water systems and agricultural land have been devastated, dismantling the basic conditions necessary for civilian life. The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has reached catastrophic proportions.
Against this backdrop, the legality of continuing military supplies has acquired unprecedented significance.
ICJ and Duties of Third States
The ICJ’s provisional measures in South Africa v. Israel fundamentally changed the legal landscape. While the Court did not determine that genocide had occurred, it concluded that South Africa’s claim under the Genocide Convention was plausible and that there existed a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm. It directed Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts prohibited under the Convention and to facilitate humanitarian assistance.
These orders also carried implications for third states. Once the world’s highest judicial body recognised a plausible risk of genocide, governments could no longer claim ignorance of the legal consequences of continuing military assistance. The duty to prevent genocide under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention requires states to exercise due diligence within the limits of their capacity to influence events.It is against this altered legal background that Amnesty evaluates India’s continuing defence exports.
Amnesty’s Allegations
Amnesty’s investigation portrays India as a significant participant in Israel’s defence supply chain rather than a marginal exporter. Analysing customs records and shipping data, it alleges that 2,596 consignments of military goods and components were exported from India to Israel during the Gaza war. These reportedly included components for explosive ordnance, military-grade small arms, artillery shell casings, armoured vehicle parts and other defence equipment destined for Israeli manufacturers and suppliers. Amnesty also states that its findings are conservative because they are based only on publicly traceable shipping records, suggesting that the actual volume may be higher.
Among the entities identified are three Indian public-sector undertakings – Munitions India Limited, Yantra India Limited and Armoured Vehicles Nigam Limited – along with several private companies including Premier Explosives Ltd, Kalyani Strategic Systems, Indo-MIM, and Ashoka Manufacturing, involved in defence manufacturing. Amnesty argues that, following repeated warnings from the ICJ and UN experts, continued military transfers into an active conflict characterised by allegations of genocide expose exporting states and companies to increasing legal and moral scrutiny.
The Government of India has firmly rejected these conclusions. The Ministry of External Affairs maintains that India’s exports of dual-use items are governed by a robust legal framework and fully comply with national laws and international obligations. Yet domestic compliance is only part of the debate. The broader question is whether existing international humanitarian law imposes additional responsibilities once a serious risk of genocide has been judicially recognised.
When Arms Become a Legal Question
The issue is not whether sovereign states may maintain defence partnerships; they unquestionably may. The real question is whether such partnerships can continue unchanged once there exists credible evidence that supplied weapons or military components may contribute to genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
International law increasingly answers this question in the affirmative. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention obliges states not merely to punish genocide but to prevent it. In its 2007 Bosnia v. Serbia judgment, the ICJ clarified that this duty requires states to employ all means reasonably available to prevent genocide where there is a serious risk. Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions similarly requires states to ensure respect for international humanitarian law, while Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility recognises that a state may incur responsibility if it knowingly aids another state in committing an internationally wrongful act.
Modern warfare has further complicated this legal landscape. Weapons are no longer produced within a single country. Every missile, artillery shell or military vehicle is the product of an international supply chain involving manufacturers, engineers, licensing authorities and exporters. Increasingly, responsibility is being examined not only on the battlefield but throughout this chain of military support. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights likewise expect companies to conduct due diligence where their products risk contributing to serious human rights abuses.
International Responsibility Beyond the Battlefield
The legal debate over arms transfers to Israel is therefore no longer merely political; it concerns the evolving obligations of states under international law. Responsibility does not necessarily end with the soldier who fires a weapon. It may also extend to those who knowingly provide the means by which unlawful violence is sustained.
This explains why an increasing number of countries have reassessed their military exports to Israel since the ICJ’s provisional measures. The Netherlands restricted exports of F-35 aircraft components to Israel following a court order. Spain suspended new arms export licences. Canada halted future export permits, while the United Kingdom suspended several licences after legal review. Even Germany, one of Israel’s closest military partners, has faced legal scrutiny before the ICJ over its continuing military support. These developments demonstrate that the question of third-state responsibility has moved beyond activist circles into courtrooms, legislatures and diplomatic forums.
The issue, therefore, is not whether India has already become legally complicit in genocide – a determination that only a competent judicial body can make. The more immediate question is whether, in light of repeated warnings from the ICJ, UN experts and humanitarian organisations, India should continue military exports that could expose the country and its defence industry to serious legal, diplomatic and moral scrutiny. The precautionary principle that governs many areas of international law suggests that where the risk involves irreversible human suffering, caution rather than commercial expediency should prevail.
India’s Moral and Constitutional Dilemma
India’s position carries particular significance because of its historical identity. Independent India’s foreign policy was shaped by anti-colonial solidarity, support for oppressed peoples and respect for international law. For decades, India stood firmly with the Palestinian cause while advocating a peaceful two-state solution.
Over the past three decades, however, Israel has become one of India’s closest strategic and defence partners. Cooperation today extends from surveillance technology and drones to missile systems, cyber security and intelligence sharing. There is nothing inherently unlawful in maintaining such relations. Every sovereign nation has the right to pursue its security interests.
Yet strategic partnerships cannot become immune from legal or ethical scrutiny. A nation that invokes international law in defending its own sovereignty, territorial integrity and security must apply those same principles consistently elsewhere. The credibility of international law depends upon its universal application, not its selective invocation.
This is particularly true for India, whose Constitution places justice, liberty, equality and fraternity at the heart of its democratic vision. These constitutional ideals are not confined within national borders. They represent values that have shaped India’s moral standing in the international community for decades.
Gaza: A Test of Humanity
Ultimately, this debate is not about trade statistics or export licences. It is about human lives.Gaza’s tragedy cannot be measured solely by casualty figures. It is measured in schools that no longer echo with children’s voices, hospitals struggling without medicines or electricity, entire neighbourhoods erased from maps and families waiting for food that never arrived. Every destroyed university represents a generation denied education. Every demolished hospital denies healthcare to thousands. Every child orphaned by war carries wounds that may endure for a lifetime.
Wars eventually end, but their consequences do not. Children inherit trauma, families inherit grief and societies inherit bitterness that may take generations to overcome. The true cost of war is measured not only in lives lost but in futures extinguished.
It is precisely to prevent such catastrophes that the international community adopted the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions after the horrors of the World War II. Those instruments were founded on a simple yet profound conviction: that no political objective, strategic alliance or commercial interest should ever outweigh the protection of innocent human life.
If these principles are applied selectively, they lose not only their legal authority but also their moral force. ‘Never Again’ ceases to be a universal commitment and becomes a slogan invoked only when politically convenient.
The Choice Before India – and the World
The question before India, and indeed every nation that continues to supply arms or military technology to genocide-committing Israel, is therefore profoundly simple. When international courts warn of a plausible risk of genocide, when humanitarian agencies repeatedly document starvation, mass displacement and the destruction of civilian life, should commercial contracts and geopolitical calculations continue to take precedence over humanity?
Genocide is seldom the work of one government alone. It survives through an ecosystem of political support, military supply chains, financial transactions and diplomatic silence. History remembers not only those who ordered the bombings but also those who continued to supply the machinery of war after the world had been repeatedly warned of its consequences.
Whether India’s exports ultimately amount to legal complicity is for international courts to determine. But the moral question cannot be postponed until judicial proceedings conclude. Democracies are expected to exercise judgement before tragedy becomes irreversible, not merely after responsibility has been assigned.
The tragedy of Gaza will one day become history. When that history is written, it will record not only who destroyed its cities and buried its children beneath the rubble, but also how the international community responded when confronted with overwhelming evidence of human suffering. It will ask which nations chose caution over commerce, principle over expediency and humanity over geopolitics.
That is the real test before India today. More importantly, it is the test before the conscience of the world. If the promise of international law is to mean anything, it must protect all human beings equally. Otherwise, the gravest casualty of the Gaza war will not be a city or a people alone, but the very idea that justice in the international order is universal rather than selective.