Saudi Arabia has long portrayed itself as a defender of Arab and Muslim causes, but as Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank endure what multiple human rights experts and organizations have agreed can only be categorized as ethnic cleansing and genocide, the Kingdom has refrained from using the massive leverage it holds through investments in corporations aiding Israel’s continuous crimes against humanity. Instead, it has often enabled them.
Saudi Arabia commands one of the world’s largest oil outputs, purchases more U.S. weapons than any other country, and wields significant diplomatic and economic sway. Yet none of these levers were meaningfully activated to protect Palestinians.
This restraint was likely tied to its behind-the-scenes pursuit of normalization with Israel. The result is that Saudi Arabia’s potentially formidable, diplomatic influence, was reduced to symbolic rhetoric, offering Palestinians sympathy but no substantive protection.
By providing fuel, funds, and, arguably, cover to Israel’s genocide, Saudi Arabia crossed firmly into the territory of complicity.
The oil keeps flowing
Despite the ongoing massacres and genocide in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest Arab state, has chosen effective silence over meaningful action. With routine condemnations in international forums, it pointedly refused to leverage its immense power to slow or stop the carnage. In stark contrast to 1973, when King Faisal wielded an oil embargo to pressure Israel’s war supporters, Saudi officials in 2023 assured Washington and Tel Aviv that no such oil leverage would be used. “That is not on the table today,” laughed Saudi investment minister Khalid al-Falih when pressed about an oil embargo to halt the Gaza war.
Al-Falih emphasized that Saudi Arabia had “no intention” of using oil production to influence Israel’s actions, preferring “peaceful discussions” instead. This public stance all but gave the green light to Israel’s military campaign, signaling that the Kingdom would not disrupt business-as-usual in protest of Palestinian bloodshed.
Behind closed doors, Saudi Arabia’s behavior was even more troubling. Instead of applying pressure on Israel, the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, maintained, and even deepened strategic ties that indirectly fueled the assault on Gaza.
Investigations reveal that Saudi Arabia continued to supply critical resources to Israel throughout the war. Oil exports are a prime example. A March 2024 report by Oil Change International traced how Israel consistently received shipments of crude oil via Egypt’s SUMED pipeline, a transit route that originates in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, even as bombs rained on Gaza. In fact, Saudi and Emirati oil made its way through this pipeline to Israeli refineries, providing fuel that powered Israeli jets and tanks.
“Countries continuing to provide fuel to Israel are playing a part in enabling the ongoing violence,” the report warned. Saudi Arabia was named among those “implicated in supplying Israel with fuel” for its military operations.
Investing in war
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman single handedly controls the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has poured billions into U.S. industries, including the defense sector. In recent years, the Saudi PIF quietly became a major stakeholder in U.S. arms manufacturers. It holds a $714 million stake in Boeing, and invested in other aerospace and technology firms deeply intertwined with U.S. military support for Israel.
Read more: A Man with a Crown and Unchecked Power: Inside Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund
These investments mean that Saudi money was, and still is, helping enrich the very companies arming Israel’s offensive. Rather than divest or threaten to pull these funds during the Gaza war, Saudi Arabia stayed the course, effectively betting on the war’s profiteers.
Likewise, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) sent an astonishing $2 billion to former White House adviser Jared Kushner’s new equity fund, money that was explicitly earmarked to invest in Israeli tech firms. This 2022 deal marked the first known direct Saudi investment in Israel’s economy, breaking a taboo in exchange for anticipated political favors.
By 2024, Kushner’s Saudi-funded firm had quietly acquired stakes in Israeli companies, some involved in sensitive sectors like cybersecurity and finance. In the midst of Gaza’s agony, Saudi capital was literally entangled in Israel’s high-tech and defense ecosystem, a stark conflict between the government’s proclaimed solidarity with Palestine and its monetary pursuits.
Perhaps the most brazen form of Saudi-Israeli collusion has been in security cooperation. Despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations, extensive evidence shows Riyadh and Tel Aviv working in tandem on military and intelligence matters. A telling example is the NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware, an Israeli cyber weapon.
In 2017, MBS struck a secret $55 million deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to obtain Pegasus, with Israel’s Defense Ministry approving Saudi use of the spyware. The quid pro quo was clear: not only did Saudi Arabia acquire a tool it later used for human rights violations and to hack dissidents, but MBS opened Saudi airspace to Israel and refrained from criticizing the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords as part of the bargain.
This clandestine pact underscores that Riyadh and Tel Aviv have moved from being secret contacts to strategic partners, aligning against common foes like Iran and sharing weapons technology. It is little surprise, then, that as Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza, Saudi Arabia offered no resistance; the two states’ military interests have quietly converged.
Yemen: A mirror of Saudi Arabia’s own war crimes
Saudi complicity in the violence against Palestinians comes into even sharper relief when viewed alongside the Kingdom’s own conduct in Yemen. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a brutal military intervention in Yemen that has killed and starved tens of thousands of civilians with the U.S. and UK supplying the warplanes and bombs.
In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes have hit school buses, weddings, marketplaces, and hospitals with horrifying regularity, drawing accusations of war crimes from the U.N. and human rights organizations. Saudi forces imposed a prolonged blockade on Yemen ports, using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, a flagrant war crime under international law.
Yet, despite overwhelming evidence of egregious abuses, Saudi Arabia, like Israel, has faced virtually no consequences. Instead, it has leveraged its economic and diplomatic influence to escape censure, pressuring the U.N. to shutter a war crimes investigation in Yemen in 2021, and muzzling media criticism through lucrative arms and oil deals with Western powers. This reflects the impunity that is now extended to Israel.
Saudi Arabia’s inferred support has given Israel a layer of regional cover, fragmenting what could have been a unified Arab front pressuring Tel Aviv to halt its onslaught.
The parallels are striking. In both Yemen and Gaza, warplanes bombed children with impunity, and those supplying the warplanes walked free, signaling to aggressors worldwide that with the right friends, war crimes will be ignored and even facilitated.
As Washington continues to court Saudi Arabia with security pacts and business deals, it is effectively rewarding MBS while he helps “America’s closest ally”, Israel, as they decimate Gaza. This realpolitik comes at the cost of fundamental human values.
If apartheid-like conditions and mass killings of Palestinians are ever to end, all enablers must be named, and that includes Arab states.
We are witnessing the cumulative result of double standards; one set of rules for Western-aligned powers and their friends, another set for their foes.
In Gaza and the West Bank, countless Palestinians are grieving lost family members and watching their homeland effectively burn to ashes. In Yemen, an entire generation of children is growing up stunted and traumatized. Saudi Arabia is deeply implicated in both tragedies, by commission in one and omission in the other.
