Palestinians, seen through a torn tent, ride a motorized vehicle past the rubble, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a highly coordinated attack on Israel, infiltrating cities, hitting military bases and killing and taking hostage soldiers and civilians. Israel responded with a devastating military campaign in the Gaza strip which has now left more than 41,000 dead, more than half of them women and children.

Also Read: What is Hamas, the Palestinian militant group?

During the attack, 1,205 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, includes hostages who subsequently died or killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip. Hamas took 251 hostages back to Gaza, some as corpses, with the stated goal to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and detainees. A year later, some 64 are still detained, while 117 have been freed and 70 confirmed dead.

Vowing to destroy Hamas and bring back the hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began bombing the Gaza strip and launched ground offensives with the Israeli Defence Forces leaving no spot untouched. The United Nations has estimated that nearly all of Gaza’s population of 2.4 million has been displaced.

Most of the internally displaced people, roughly two million, are living in make-shift camps in the south. According to the U.N., at the schools that shelter refugees, each toilet and shower are shared by hundreds of people. Diseases associated with poor sanitation are rampant. The U.N. has warned that a famine in the tiny strip of land with 2.3 million people is “imminent”.

The Axis of Resistance, a group of Iran-backed militia including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis, has also attacked Israel on multiple fronts, leading to the U.S. increasing its military presence to defend Israel.

Take a look at the timeline below to understand all the events that has occurred since October 7, 2023:

Victoria stands in front a picture of her sister, Yulia Waxer Daunt, as she visits the site of the Nova music festival, where hundreds of revelers were killed and abducted by Hamas and taken into Gaza, on the one-year anniversary of the attack, near Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel on October 7, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza began and led to escalating conflict around the Middle East, according to a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project, released on the anniversary of Hamas’ attacks on Israel.

An additional $4.86 billion has gone into stepped-up U.S. military operations in the region since the Oct 7, 2023, attacks, 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 Yemen’s Houthis, who are carrying them out in solidarity with the fellow Iranian-backed group Hamas.

Also Read: West Asia crisis updates (October 7, 2024)

The report — completed before Israel opened a second front, this one against Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, in late September — is one of the first tallies of estimated U.S. costs as the Biden administration backs Israel in its conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon and seeks to contain hostilities by Iran-allied armed groups in the region.

The financial toll is on top of the cost in human lives: Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people in Israel a year ago and took others hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

At least 1,400 people in Lebanon, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed since Israel 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.

Here’s a look at where some of the U.S. taxpayer money went: Record military aid to Israel, who is 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 Israel in one year. The U.S. committed to providing billions in military assistance to Israel 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.

The U.S. aid since the Gaza war started includes military financing, arms sales, at least $4.4 billion in drawdowns from U.S. stockpiles and hand-me-downs of used equipment.

Much of the US weapons delivered in the year were munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bunker-busters and precision-guided bombs.

Expenditures range from $4 billion to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defence systems to cash for rifles and jet fuel, the study says.

Unlike the U.S. publicly documented military aid to Ukraine, it was impossible to get the full details of what the U.S. has shipped Israel since last October 7, so the $17.9 billion for the year is a partial figure, the researchers said.

They cited Biden administration “efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering”. Funding for the key US ally during a war that has exacted a heavy toll on civilians has divided Americans during the presidential campaign. But support for Israel has long carried weight in U.S. politics, and Mr. Biden said on Friday (October 4, 2024) that “no administration has helped Israel more than I have”. The Biden administration has bolstered its military strength in the region since the war in Gaza started, aiming to deter and respond to any attacks on Israeli and American forces.

Those additional operations cost at least $4.86 billion, the report said, not including beefed-up US military aid to Egypt and other partners in the region.

The U.S. had 34,000 forces in the Middle East the day that Hamas broke through Israeli barricades around Gaza to attack. That number rose to about 50,000 in August when two aircraft carriers were in the region, aiming to discourage retaliation after a strike attributed to Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. The total is now around 43,000.

The number of U.S. vessels and aircraft deployed — aircraft carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, fighter squadrons, and air defense batteries — in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has varied during the year.

The Pentagon has said another aircraft carrier strike group is headed to Europe very soon and that could increase the troop total again if two carriers are again in the region at the same time.