Modi begins two-day visit to Israel to strengthen bilateral ties
India’s PM is starting his two-day visit to Israel today. “We are acting to strengthen our alliances. Next week, my close friend Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, a huge global power, will visit Israel,” Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu had announced last week.
Modi visited Israel as PM in 2017 and Netanyahu made a reciprocal visit to India the following year. Under Modi’s leadership, ties between the two countries have deepened, with expanding cooperation in technology, agriculture, security and other sectors.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend a welcome ceremony upon Modi’s arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, on February 25
India has been Israel’s largest arms importer
Between 2020 and 2024, Israel was the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter, accounting for 3.1 percent of global arms exports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
India was the largest importer of Israeli weapons during this period at 34 percent, followed by the US at 13 percent and the Philippines at 8.1 percent, the data shared by the organisation showed.
Israel and India signed investment deal in September 2025. That agreement in 2025 sought to boost trade and investment flows between the two countries. It was signed during far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s trip to the South Asian country.
According to official figures, bilateral trade stood at $3.9bn in 2024. The bulk of the trade between the two sides is in the domain of defence and security, with New Delhi being Israel’s largest weapons buyer. India has kept its close ties to Israel, even when the latter faced growing political isolation over its genocidal war on Gaza.
India joins global condemnation on Israeli expansion in occupied West Bank
India joined other UN member states and organisations in signing a statement condemning Israel’s expansion in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. The statement read that the countries “strongly condemn unilateral Israeli decisions and measures aimed at expanding Israel’s unlawful presence in the West Bank”, Palestinian ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said last week.
According to The Times of India, India endorsed the statement late on Wednesday, just before the deadline to be a signatory elapsed.
Kashmir, spying, demolitions: How Modi’s India embraced ‘Israel model’
At a private event in November 2019, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s then consul general in New York, was caught on camera calling for the Indian government to adopt an “Israeli model” in Indian-administered Kashmir.
At the time, millions in Kashmir were already reeling under a crippling military lockdown and communication blackout: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian government had stripped the region of its semi-autonomous status months earlier, jailing thousands of people, including the region’s political leaders – even those who are pro-India.
The senior Indian diplomat was musing about Israel’s far-right settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, in reference to the resettling of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, who had to flee their homeland in a 1989 exodus after an armed rebellion against Indian rule started in the Himalayan region.
“It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it,” Chakravorty told the gathering, adding that the Modi government was “determined” to do so.
Six years later, Chakravorty’s words ring truer than ever. As Modi prepares for his second visit to Israel starting on February 25, the two countries are bound by more than just friendship, trade and military partnerships – they are increasingly, say some analysts, also joined at the hip in certain facets of their models of governance.
