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MADRID: The Spanish government has canceled a contract worth nearly 700 million euros ($825 million) for Israeli-designed rocket launchers, according to an official document seen Monday by AFP.
The move comes after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced last week that his government would “consolidate in law” a ban on military equipment sales or purchases with Israel over its offensive in Gaza.
The contract, awarded to a consortium of Spanish companies, involved the purchase of 12 SILAM rocket launcher systems derived from the PULS platform made by Israeli firm Elbit Systems, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance.
First reported by local media and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the cancelation was formalized on Spain’s official public contracts platform on September 9.
The following day, Sanchez unveiled measures aimed at stopping what his leftist government called “the genocide in Gaza.”
It includes the approval of a decree imposing a ban on military equipment sales or purchases with Israel due to its military offensive in Gaza, launched after the Hamas attacks in October 2023.
Spain applied the ban as Israel stepped up its military onslaught.
Spain has also formalized the cancelation of another contract for 168 anti-tank missile launchers, which were to be manufactured under license from an Israeli company.
That contract, valued at 287 million euros, had been first reported by the press in June.
According to Spanish daily La Vanguardia, the government is undertaking a broader review to phase out Israeli weapons and technology from its armed forces.
Sanchez has emerged as one of Europe’s most outspoken critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza policy.
Relations between the two countries have been tense for months.
Israel has not had an ambassador in Spain since Madrid recognized the state of Palestine in 2024.
Last week, Spain recalled its ambassador to Israel after heated exchanges over Sánchez’s new measures.
The Barcelona-based Delas Center, a security research institute, estimated in April that since the start of the Gaza war, Spain had awarded 46 contracts worth $1.044 billion to Israeli companies, based on public tender data.

PARIS: Three French women including a niece of notorious extremist propagandists went on trial on Monday, accused of traveling to the Middle East to join Daesh and taking their eight children with them.
One of the women is Jennyfer Clain, a 34-year-old niece of Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, who claimed responsibility on behalf of Daesh for the attacks on November 13, 2015, when 130 people died at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in shootings that traumatized France.
The Clain brothers are presumed dead. In 2022, they were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment without parole.
The two other women on trial are Jennyfer Clain’s sister-in-law, Mayalen Duhart, 42, and 67-year-old Christine Allain, the women’s mother-in-law.
Each of them faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
Duhart is the only one of the three who is appearing in court as a free woman, saying she is now working at a bakery.
The defendants are being tried by a special criminal court in Paris that is sitting without a jury — standard practice in terrorism cases.
The women had traveled to Raqqa, the Daesh group’s onetime capital, with their children in 2014.
After the 2017 battle for Raqqa, which marked Daesh’s defeat, the women spent two years with its retreating forces before trying to enter Turkiye.
Turkish authorities detained the three women in 2019 as they attempted to enter from Syria with nine children between ages 3 and 13.
Eight of the children had been born in France.
The women were then expelled to France, where they were charged with criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.
Clain and Duhart are also being prosecuted for failing to fulfil their parental obligations, notably for voluntarily taking their eight children “to a war zone to join a terrorist group,” the indictment said, exposing them to “significant risk of physical and psychological harm.”
In their decision to refer the three women to a criminal court, the investigating judges noted that they “remained for a long period of time” within extremist groups.
“It was with full knowledge of the facts” that Allain and her two daughters-in-law chose to join the Daesh group in Syria after the caliphate was established, according to the investigating magistrates’ indictment seen by AFP.
Allain’s lawyer said she had worked hard to turn her life around.
“She still considers herself a Muslim, but she has only known one interpretation of Islam, the wrong one,” he said.
“She hates the person she had become.”
The trial is scheduled to last until September 26.