In late October, yet another video from Gaza showed dozens of Palestinian men rounded up, blindfolded, and hauled away by Israeli occupation soldiers. In the footage, broadcast by an Israeli news channel, the Palestinian hostages, reportedly from the besieged city of Jabalia in northern Gaza, were crammed inside the cargo bed of an Israeli military truck.

Intercept – Al-Khabar Al-Yemeni translation:

The vehicle appears to be an Oshkosh M1085 5-Ton Long Cargo medium tactical vehicle.

Over the last year, the Israeli military has received at least 100 Oshkosh armored vehicles like the one in the video. These vehicles arrived on vessels operated by the commercial shipping and logistics giant A.P. Moller Maersk.

Israel has long used armored vehicles as killing machines throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. Images of Palestinians crushed by Israeli tanks and trucks are now familiar to anyone paying attention to the ongoing Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

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 the International Progressive Organization. The investigation details how Maersk has shipped millions of pounds of military goods, including hundreds of armored and tactical vehicles and their components, to the Israeli Ministry of Defense since Israel’s genocidal war began last year.

The findings, shared in advance with The Intercept, reveal the significant role that Maersk—a publicly traded, family-controlled company—has played in delivering military goods to the Israeli entity, 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.”

After 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 material 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 commercial ships carrying weapons that could be used for war crimes from docking 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, including equipment for putting bombs on aircraft, frequently transited through Algeciras, one of the largest ports in Europe, said Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International researchers.

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

The organizers at the Palestinian Youth Movement and the International Progressive Organization hope that their research on Maersk will shed light on the global supply chains that support Israel’s war so that activists can improve their strategies.

“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 manufacturing companies in the US, of weapons flowing to the Israeli military, and from looted goods flowing from Palestine—every chain of complicity that sustains the Israeli project in collective killing depends on logistics companies like Maersk.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement, a Palestinian-led diaspora group, launched the “Mask Off Maersk” campaign last June to shed light on the shipping firm’s role in facilitating the circulation of material used in Israel’s attacks on Palestine and Lebanon. The group aims to build a movement around a non-parliamentary strategy called a “people’s arms embargo.” The idea is to target the infrastructure that makes Israel’s Western-backed assault against Palestine possible through a strategy of mobilizations, divestment, and labor movements.

The U.S. government bears responsibility for providing nearly 70% of the imported weapons to Israel, such as fighter jets, missiles, and thousands of devastating 2,000-pound bombs.

While the specific contents shipped by Maersk are often unclear, the company has been contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense to transport weapons to Israel. Information on Maersk shipments to the Israeli military on behalf of the American government is hard to obtain, the researchers said, due to the limited information available to the public about the nature of these shipments.

The Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International’s research focuses on the millions of pounds of military goods transported to Israel aboard Maersk commercial vessels in the last year.

Most of the shipments reviewed departed from the port of Elizabeth, in New Jersey, Maersk’s largest East Coast terminal, operated by its subsidiary APM, which handles more than 2,500 trucks’ worth of daily shipments. The campaign’s researchers sifted through shipment data to explore Harmonized System Codes, or (HS) Codes, to establish the nature of the contents sent from Elizabeth to Israel’s military.

Interglobal Forwarding Services, an American firm incorporated in New Jersey, operates as a shipping agent for the Israeli army in the US, organizing 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. The Biden administration has repeatedly approved U.S. funding for Israel to buy American-made weapons, for example, blessing more than $700 million in both aid for and sales of Oshkosh tactical vehicles.

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.

Interglobal came under fire in a 2017 report by the International Peace Information Service, an independent human rights research institute, for its shipping activities during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza. At the time, the freight forwarder’s shipping documents did not report the name of the companies that were actually shipping military equipment to Israel.

The 2017 report noted that, as much as a decade ago, “the bills of lading accompanying shipments of military and associated equipment to Israel on commercial vessels” were “poorly described and mostly in generic terms.” As with the Maersk shipments in the last year, “Hundreds of bills of lading only included ‘military equipment’ as a description of the cargo.”

Now, some Spanish observers want their government to take actions to halt the flow of military goods through Spanish ports.

“The government of Spain has lied repeatedly about the sale, purchase, and transit of weapons destined for Israel throughout this year of genocide,” said Ione Belarra, a politician with Podemos. She added, “It is time for Spain and Europe to comply with their legal obligations and suspend all commercial and diplomatic relations with a terrorist state like Israel.”