A French soldier stands guard next to a Reaper drone at the French military airbase in Niamey.     (File photo -- Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty)

Paris, June 21 (RHC)-- The French government has authorized the sale of electronic equipment for drones used by Israel to bomb civilians in the Gaza Strip, an investigative report says.  The French nonprofit media outlet Disclose said in a recent report that the export license for this war equipment “approved by the upper reaches of power” in the country.

As revealed in a dozen confidential documents obtained by the outlet, the equipment in question is the TSC 4000 IFF transponder that is used in the construction of Israel's Hermes 900 armed drones.  France owns a 26 percent stake in the company, according to the report.

“At least eight of these transponders were supposed to be flown to Israel between December 2023 and the end of May 2024.”  “That's several months after the first aerial bombings. Two transponders were delivered in 2024,” the report said.

The other six are reported to have been blocked by French customs.  The report has listed at least eight deadly strikes by Israeli drones against civilians and infrastructure in Gaza since October 2023. 

Citing an Israeli military commander, it said one of those deadly strikes happened in February, when the regime’s military used the drones to directly target the hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

It was also in February when French Minister Sebastien Lecornu claimed that equipment exported to Israel “does not include weapons as such but basic components to which the interministerial commission … pays particular attention depending on the equipment into which they are to be integrated.”

Lecornu, according to the report, failed to point out that the government of President Emmanuel Macron “had allowed out of the country some Thales equipment used to equip drones involved in the offensive in Gaza.”

Under an arms trade treaty signed by France in 2014, the government should have suspended the export license to Israel as soon as it was aware of the military attacks directed against the people of Gaza.

A handful of Western governments have provided Israel with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and military equipment since the regime started its offensive against Gaza on October 7.

The United States and Germany have supplied the vast majority of the regime’s imported arms.  They have long been under pressure by NGOs and civilian society to halt arms supplies to Israel since the weapons may be used by Israeli armed forces to commit war crimes in Gaza.

Israel's military forces have killed more than 37,400 people in the Gaza Strip since early October.