More Cargo Shipped to Azerbaijan From Israeli Air Base

BAKU — An Azerbaijani cargo plane has carried out another flight to and from a military airfield in southern Israel in a sign of continuing Israeli arms supplies to Azerbaijan.

Data available on Flight Radar24, a website tracking international flights, shows that the plane belonging to the Azerbaijani Silk Way airline returned to Baku on Wednesday from the Israeli Air Force’s Ovda base. As always, the carrier did not reveal what it transported to Azerbaijan.

Ovda is the only airfield through which explosives can be flown into and out of Israel. It is believed to be a key conduit for Israeli exports of weapons and ammunition to Azerbaijan. They have totaled billion of dollars in the last two decades, making the Jewish state one of Azerbaijan’s main arms suppliers.

Those supplies continued even during the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani forces heavily used Israeli-made attack drones and multiple-launch rocket systems throughout the six-week hostilities. Visiting Israel in March 2023, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov thanked the Israeli government for that support.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported last year that Azerbaijani cargo planes landed at the Ovda air base for at least 92 times from 2016-2023. According to the paper, the frequency of such flights spiked in the run-up to Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that restored its full control over Karabakh.

The Ovda-Baku flights continued even after the outbreak of the ongoing conflict in Gaza last October which led Israel to seek and receive large-scale military aid from the United States. The Armenian investigative publication Hetq.am counted about a dozen such flights between November 2023 and April 2024.

Azerbaijan’s military spending is reportedly due to reach $3.7 billion this year, compared with Armenia’s defense budget projected at $1.4 billion. Despite this disparity and its continuing military build-up, Baku has angrily denounced Armenia’s recent arms deal with a number of other countries and France in particular.