Making a Killing: Who profits from slaughter in Gaza and Yemen?

Making a Killing: Who profits from slaughter in Gaza and Yemen?

Submitted by Fleur Hargreaves on Thu, 10/01/2026 - 17:23 New book by Andrew Feinstein traces $50bn in profit from the genocide in Gaza BAE Systems' stand at the Defence and Security Equipment International fair at the ExCeL centre, in east London, on 9 September 2025 (AFP/Adrian Dennis) Off

“The global trade in weapons is a business that counts its profits in billions, and its losses in human lives.” 

This devastating balance sheet is the subject of Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen, a new book by arms corruption investigative organisation Shadow World Investigations, co-authored by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde and Jack Cinamon. 

In it, they trace the rivers of blood that flow from the ruins of Gaza and Yemen into backroom meetings with politicians and arms manufacturing CEOs, exposing the corruption at the heart of the military-industrial complex – less a virus infecting the industry, but rather its lifeblood, keeping it alive.

The project began in 2017 with the intention of chronicling the Yemen crisis, but the authors incorporated Gaza after the start of the genocide in October 2023. 

Due to be published in November, the work conveys the urgency and immediacy of conflicts coming to define the collapse of international order and the moral supremacy once claimed by Western democracies. 

Suffice to say, while the losses are never felt by the profiteers of war, the book delivers its own eulogy to some of its victims, through the voices of Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, and the founders of Yemen-based Mwatana for Human Rights, Radhya al-Mutawakel and Abdulrasheed al-Faqih. 

Mwatana is an organisation which aims to document civilian casualties from the war in Yemen not being recorded in international or regional media.

Alnaouq, author of We Are Not Numbers, had three generations of his family wiped out in a single Israeli air strike on his home in Gaza.

In the book, he harrowingly recounts how he found out in a message from a friend in Gaza reading: “Airstrike. Everyone killed.”

“Israel thought that killing my family would silence me, that it would break me,” he says, “but they could not have anticipated that this would give my life a new purpose.

“More than ever, my life now has meaning, a clear and determined goal: to find out who murdered my family, who profited from the murder of my family.” 

The quest to answer this question becomes the driving force of the investigation that Feinstein, Rohde and Cinamon embark on.

Illegal and legal corruption

Although a lesser known conflict, the authors recount in great detail the history of the war in Yemen and how it has been enabled by Western arms – a reality still ongoing after UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently pledged to continue supporting Saudi Arabia amid the latest escalation with Yemen’s Houthis.

The relationship between Western powers and Saudi Arabia – explained simply by then Crown Prince Fahd as trading oil for security – has long been rife with bribery and illegality.

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The Al-Yamamah arms deal between Saudi Arabia and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was the largest in UK history, with up to £6bn ($7.94bn) allegedly paid in bribes and lavish gifts to Saudi royals, intermediaries, and others – including Thatcher’s own son – by the firm known today as BAE Systems, the UK’s largest weapons company.

Despite making up just half a percent of global trade, arms deals account for an estimated 40 percent of corruption cases.

Such corruption is facilitated by opaque deals, made with taxpayer money, hidden behind high security clearances lest our enemies get hold of such valuable information.

While some corruption is overt, much of it is systematic, they explain, with manufacturers like BAE Systems routinely treated as an arm of the state. 

What is often referred to as a “revolving door” between government officials and arms lobbyists could more accurately be described as an “open plan office” – or, as Tony Blair’s foreign secretary once remarked of BAE Systems, having the key to 10 Downing Street’s garden door. 

US hegemony 

It is not the products themselves, whose value is usually over-inflated bordering on a rip-off, but the company��s ability to influence government that enables this relationship to take place, the authors argue.

In this way, the blood-soaked cash circulates back through the grubby hands of corrupt politicians, lobby groups and think tanks and into the lifeblood of our democracy, thwarting foreign policy to facilitate further accumulation of private profit at any cost. 

It is not a bug, but rather the system working as intended.

“The arms trade is the backbone of state power under US hegemony,” the authors argue: with Israel and Saudi Arabia representing two “strategic poles” of maintaining US power in the Middle East. 

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Yemen and Gaza signify the global shift from European colonial power to the post-war period of “US-centred political and economic order”.

Within this, elites of all nationalities collaborate with each other and arms bosses for their own personal enrichment and to sustain a system that allows them to continue getting fat on profits.

This is why foreign policy often seems to take place outside the realm of democratic contestation, with decisions made in some out-of-view corporate suite unaffected by the millions of people that take to the streets in protest.

“The corrupt arms trade is dragging us inexorably into a world in which even liberal democracies are becoming the best democracies money can buy,” they write.

Forever wars

Quoting George Orwell’s 1984, the authors write that “the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival”.

Thus defence spending is sold as being in the public interest, keeping us safe – even as it soaks up money that could be going into public services.

There are always magic money trees for war.

Meddling in foreign affairs by funnelling weaponry into unstable regional conflicts carries certain risks, including what is known as blowback.

From arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight to the Soviets to supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, the US has a habit of having their friends turn into enemies overnight

“Blowback,” the book explains, “illustrates how the cavalier global distribution of weapons can fuel the very instability that the arms trade and defence establishment claim to guard against.” 

From arming the mujihadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets to supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, the US has a habit of having their friends turn into enemies overnight. 

But when pockets are lined by instability and violence, blowback is experienced as a benefit, while risk is outsourced to ordinary people in the region: another villain created for the war on terror to target, another opportunity to rile up the public into supporting endless wars under the guise of “defence”.

In some instances, this is explicit. 

Israel Ziv, former head of the Israeli army’s Operations Directorate and founder of Global CST, a security services firm which orchestrated Israeli weapons exports, was sanctioned by the US government for supplying weapons to both sides of the conflict in South Sudan, while simultaneously profiting from contracts to solve the humanitarian crisis he helped create. 

Similarly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the UK into an illegal invasion of Iraq and lied to the public about its weapons of mass destruction, has capitalised on his failures since leaving office, most notably sitting on Trump’s “Board of Peace” to reconstruct Gaza. 

“While Palestinians sift through 60 million tonnes of rubble, Blair and his allies are already planning how to monetise the rebuild,” Feinstein, Rohde and Cinamon write. 

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“The man who helped break the region is now selling himself as the one to fix it – for a fee.” 

Making a Killing lays bare how executives and politicians arranged a price for human lives in corporate boardrooms, never having to face the cost of their actions halfway across the world. 

The book’s investigation calculated the final sum of the profit accumulated from levelling Gaza, destroying countless families like Alnaouq’s, to be $50bn. 

The rich and powerful involved in the “Board of Peace” hope to generate further profits by transforming Gaza into a real estate free-for-all, as an AI video posted by Trump suggested.

Israeli technology is marketed as “battle-tested” in Gaza and exported to conflicts around the world, as well as being used for domestic surveillance to counter anti-government protest.

Bloodbaths like Gaza and Yemen are treated as “laboratories” for high-tech weaponry then sold at extortionate prices at arms fairs.

The answer to the question “who made the bomb that killed my family” exposes the greed and corruption inherent to an industry whose model of growth relies on death and destruction, which lies at the centre of western hegemony. 

Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde and Jack Cinamon is published by Verso

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