Key ME states expanded cooperation with Israeli military amid Gaza war: files

GAZA: Leaked US documents reveal that some key Middle Eastern states quietly expanded their security cooperation with Israel during the two-year genocide in Gaza, Quds News Network reported.

According to The Washington Post, citing leaked US documents, over the past three years, facilitated by the US, senior military officials from Israel and six Middle Eastern countries came together for planning meeting.

In May 2024, the documents show, senior Israeli and Arab military officials convened at a major US military facility in an Arab state. A planning document for the event, written two days before it was set to begin, shows that the Israeli delegation was scheduled to fly directly to the air base, circumventing the Arab state’s civilian points of entry that could have risked public exposure.

Five Centcom PowerPoint presentations, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and reviewed by The Washington Post, detail the creation of what the US military describes as the “Regional Security Construct.”

The presentations are marked unclassified and were distributed to the construct’s partners, and in some cases also to the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the US. They were written between 2022 and 2025, before and after the launch of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

One meeting in particular, in January at the Army’s Fort Campbell in Kentucky, roughly an hour’s drive from Nashville, included sessions where US forces trained partners on how to detect and neutralize threats posed by subterranean tunnels. Another document describes partners from six countries participating in a training to destroy underground tunnels but did not name the countries.