United Airlines Resumes Shipping Military Parts to Elbit Systems Aboard Passenger Flight to Tel Aviv

On Wednesday evening, United Airlines flight 90 is scheduled to carry five shipments of military cargo from Newark to Tel Aviv, according to shipping records reviewed by The Intercept. The flight is a passenger route. The cargo is bound for weapons manufacturing.

One shipment is addressed to the electro-optics division of Elbit Systems in Rehovot. Another goes to Elbit Systems Land, formerly IMI Systems, in Ramat Hasharon. Three more are bound for an Elbit facility in Karmiel. At least one of the Karmiel-bound shipments carries the label "FMS," for foreign military sales, the records show.

The flight marks a return to a practice United had paused more than six months ago, when war broke out between Israel and Iran. Before that pause, the airline had used civilian passenger routes to move military materiel to Israel throughout its campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, according to a report released this week by the Movement Research Unit, Palestinian Youth Movement, People's Embargo for Palestine, and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Using open-source cargo data, the report's authors tracked 2,761 shipments to weapons manufacturers carried by United aboard 160 civilian flights between July 24, 2025, and February 27, 2026. Because of the volume, researchers analyzed a subset of 546 shipments in detail. That sample included 28 shipments of tank parts, 131 shipments of components for Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet, 67 shipments of other aircraft parts, and more than 100 shipments of radio equipment, helmet-mounted display systems, and hardware such as nuts and bolts.

"This report shows that United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military for its operations in Gaza, in Lebanon, and against Iran," said Griffin Mahon, a co-chair of the national labor committee of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Belal Elsiesy, a spokesperson for Palestinian Youth Movement, said some of the parts identified in the shipments correspond to equipment visible in footage circulated from Israeli military operations. He pointed to gunner display units and armored tank sights as examples, saying such components have appeared in recordings from inside tanks during the demolition of buildings in Gaza.

United did not comment on the report or the scheduled shipments. Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept.

The report's authors say the pattern illustrates how U.S. commercial infrastructure, not just government-to-government arms sales, sustains the flow of weapons components to Israel. The FMS label on the Karmiel shipment ties the commercial route directly to the U.S. foreign military sales program, the mechanism through which Washington approves and tracks government-authorized weapons transfers.