Exclusive: Toyota reviewing use of forklifts by Israeli military after MEE investigation - Middle East Eye

Toyota has said it is investigating the use of its forklifts by the Israeli military after Middle East Eye found photos and videos of the vehicles at weapons and munitions storage sites, serving supply lines for frontline units, and being used by the army’s Logistics Corps.

It comes after MEE uncovered details of a previously unreported 158m-shekel ($49.8m) contract between Toyota and Israel’s Ministry of Defense for the supply of forklifts that was signed in 2024 – the first full year of the Gaza war.

Toyota says that its vehicles are not intended for military use.

When asked about the contract, the company told MEE it had commitments in place with both the defence ministry and its official reseller in Israel to ensure that its technology and products were “for civil use only”.

But when MEE then shared footage posted on official Israeli military social media channels, which showed Toyota forklifts being used at locations including a missiles and ammunition depot in northern Israel, a Logistics Corps training base, and inside a munitions factory, it said it was investigating the images to determine whether those agreements had been breached.

Toyota is a Japanese corporation but its main forklift business, Toyota Material Handling, is headquartered in the United States.

"While it is impossible for any vehicle maker to track vehicles that may have been bought and resold by intermediaries, we are reviewing these photos and videos and are investigating whether our use agreements have been violated," a spokesperson for Toyota Material Handling told MEE.

"If necessary, we will take action to prevent unauthorized or inappropriate use of our forklifts."

Arms industry experts told MEE that any such action could lead Toyota to suspend sales to Israel – while noting that the company’s initial acceptance of Israeli assurances that its equipment would not be put to military use, at a time when Israeli forces were facing mounting accusations of war crimes, raised questions about the robustness of its due diligence processes.

"It is true that we cannot expect companies to track their vehicles after the initial sale,” said Noam Perry, strategic research coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation in the US that researches companies supplying the Israeli military.

"However, this is a multi-million-dollar contract delivered directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense at a time when it is accused of committing war crimes. Any due diligence process should have raised questions about the use of these forklifts."

The Israeli defence ministry declined to comment.

Toyota’s sale of forklifts to Israel was revealed in a budget report for 2024, quietly published by the finance ministry’s accountant general in March 2025 and hitherto unreported, which listed the defence ministry’s largest procurement commitments for the year.

MEE can find no evidence that the contract was publicised at the time it was signed by either the defence ministry or Toyota.

An entry in the report headed “Purchase of forklifts” reads: “An engagement from 2024, valued at approximately NIS 158 million, with Toyota for the purchase of heavy-duty forklifts. The remaining balance of the engagement as of 31 December, 2024, is approximately NIS 158 million, and it is expected to conclude in 2026.”

There is no further information about how many machines were bought, but new heavy forklifts can sell for roughly $80,000 or more depending on lifting capacity, which would mean an order of this size could add up to hundreds of vehicles.

The entry is listed in a section focused on military spending under the title “Land Platforms” – military parlance for vehicles used by ground forces – and appears between a 174m-shekel ($54.9m) contract with Israeli firm Plasan Sasa for armoured vehicles and a 120m-shekel ($37.8m) purchase of armoured diggers from the US Army.

When MEE contacted Toyota Material Handling with queries about the contract, the company said its machines were not intended for military purposes.

“Toyota Material Handling forklifts are designed for civil use, such as moving merchandise in a warehouse or cargo at a port," a spokesperson said. "We would never want or condone our equipment being used for anything beyond this."

The company went on to describe binding restrictions: "We have contractual commitments in place with both our reseller in Israel and the country's Ministry of Defense that our products and technologies will be for civil use only."

Toyota’s reseller in Israel is Union Industrial Vehicle Ltd, which sells its industrial equipment brands under a single distributorship. Union Industrial Vehicle Ltd did not respond to requests for comment.

With support from Perry at the American Friends Service Committee, MEE then reviewed official Israeli military social media platforms and found photos and videos which appeared to show Toyota forklifts being used for military-related functions.

One image posted on the Instagram page of the Israeli army’s Technology and Maintenance Corps on 7 July showed a Toyota forklift carrying a pallet which appears to be loaded with munitions.

An accompanying caption reads: “A few small moments we caught from the intensive work of the missile and ammunition centre of the Northern District.”

Other images in the post show pallets stacked with 155mm artillery shells. 

The image may have been taken at the Ramat David airbase in northern Israel.

In June, the Israeli army’s Instagram and Facebook pages posted portraits of soldiers as part of an “appreciation month” campaign for reservists. Among them: a reservist major “combat manager” at the wheel of a Toyota forklift.

According to the Facebook post accompanying the photo, the combat manager had completed more than 500 reserve days "in the unit responsible for the production and supply of aircraft ammunition at Ramat David base".

Another Instagram post, dated 3 March 2024 and this time posted by the army’s Logistics Corps, showed photos of soldiers, some carrying rifles, gathered around a Toyota forklift at the Logistics Corps' Bahad 6 training base.

The Logistics Corps, the caption said, was working with the army's driving administration to continue running forklift driver training courses despite the war, including in the frontline units.

Meanwhile, a photograph posted in March this year via Kol Hahayalim, an Israeli army Instagram account, shows a Toyota forklift lifting storage drums from the back of a lorry, a soldier at the controls. The caption said the General Staff Supply Centre had issued “everything required for the IDF’s operational continuity” during Operation Roaring Lion – the US and Israeli attack on Iran – and set out what that meant: hundreds of tanker-loads of jet fuel, petrol and aviation petrol, 300 tonnes of lubricants, 70,000 spare parts for armoured fighting vehicles, 80,000 for optronic systems, and a thousand units of blood plasma.

The General Staff Supply Centre is located at the Tel Hashomer army base in central Israel.

Israel’s military has also highlighted the importance of forklifts in support of its operations, including during the mass mobilisation at the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023.

On 9 October, two days into the war, the IDF’s official Instagram account posted photographs of the operation to equip the 360,000 reservists it had just called up, including an image of a Toyota forklift with a military number plate loaded with a container of what appear to be soldiers’ helmets.

“We’re not short of equipment… Everything will arrive," the caption says. This equipment included 79,000 personal protection kits consisting of helmets and vests, according to the post.

The next day, the Israeli news website News08 published a photo of the same vehicle. It said the army had added "1,500 forklifts, trucks and pallet trucks" to its inventory of vehicles in addition to those already held by units.

MEE’s investigation uncovered another intriguing example, published by Israel’s Ministry of Defense itself, which draws attention to how some Toyota-manufactured forklifts have served the war effort.

In January 2024, the ministry posted a video on its YouTube channel under the title "Watch: how 'blue and white' shells are made".

It shows the tank and artillery shell production line at Elbit Systems, Israel's largest defence company. The line had run continuously since 7 October, the ministry said, and supplied large quantities of ammunition to the fighting forces.

Thirty-one seconds in, among the shell casings on the factory floor, stands an orange forklift, an Elbit worker in a hard hat beside it. The name on its counterweight is Toyota.

MEE understands that Toyota has now identified the forklift with records showing that the machine was sold by the company’s Israeli reseller four years ago to a civilian logistics and storage company, not to Elbit Systems. 

Toyota has no information about what became of it after that delivery – its location, use or ownership, or whether it was later sold or rented to another party, MEE understands.

Elbit Systems did not respond to requests for comment.

While these photos and videos offer episodic evidence of the Israeli military’s use of Toyota equipment, the defense ministry’s own paperwork provides further details about the extent of the forklift fleet.

A public register of contracts awarded by the ministry without competitive tender includes entries totalling some $1.7m, dated 15 February 2024, for the “maintenance of Toyota forklifts throughout the IDF”. Other forklift brands appear in the register too.

Toyota forklifts were being used by Israeli military and policing institutions before the current war on Gaza.

In 2018, the MoD published a tender for the maintenance of Toyota forklifts for the Israeli Air Force, according to Who Profits, an Israeli research centre that documents corporate ties to the occupation.

'Any sale of equipment to the Israeli military, regardless of its specific uses, is supporting the IDF's activities. There is no ethical business to be done with the IDF, period'

Who Profits records the Israeli police contracting Union Industrial Vehicle Ltd – Toyota’s Israeli distributor – in March 2022 to maintain and repair its forklifts.

An image of a Toyota forklift at the Nevatim airbase – the hub for the Israeli air force’s heavy transport planes – featured in an article published on the air force website in January 2023.

Israel's defence ministry does have civilian-facing arms. It runs rehabilitation and welfare services for wounded veterans, and a department for bereaved families and commemoration. However, the apparent role of forklifts in such departments appears limited. 

For this reason, Toyota's “civil-use” clause puzzles Perry, who leads the American Friends Service Committee’s Investigate project which documents corporate involvement in Israel’s occupation.

"Toyota cannot expect civil use only if they have a contract with [the Israeli defence ministry]," he told MEE. 

“The due diligence process, if done seriously, should have flagged a contract with a military in an active conflict zone for heightened scrutiny.”

Whatever “civil use” means in the contract, the commitment depends on someone establishing how the machines are used in practice. That duty falls on the seller, according to Samuel Perlo-Freeman, a researcher on the international arms trade at Campaign Against Arms Trade.

"Toyota can’t take Israeli assurances regarding the uses to which their equipment is put at face value, but should verify that they are not being used directly in illegal activities," Perlo-Freeman told MEE.

"If they cannot do this, then they risk complicity in such activities."

"[That said], any sale of equipment to the Israeli military, regardless of its specific uses, is supporting the IDF's activities. There is no ethical business to be done with the IDF, period."

Perlo-Freeman said he hoped Toyota would conduct a proper investigation and take appropriate action.

“With the prospect of West Bank settlement sanctions, civilian companies might be wanting to be a bit more cautious about their products being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," he said.

Toyota has not shared details of its contract with the Israeli defence ministry, nor has it said what it would treat as a violation or what action it might take.

But if the “civil use” clause is clearly stated, and there is clear evidence of a breach, then “Toyota could presumably suspend sales”, Mark Bromley, who directs the dual-use and arms trade control programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told MEE.

But, even if Toyota is able to track where its machines ended up, there may be only so much heavy lifting its contract can do.

A civil-use clause would bind two parties: Toyota’s Israeli reseller and the defence ministry.

But it would only cover the machines Toyota sells into those arrangements. Every other forklift in Israel – the ones sold to private companies, working in warehouses and ports – falls outside them, and therefore within the scope of a separate power.

Under a 1987 Israeli law governing the registration and requisition of equipment for the military, the army can take privately owned equipment from the civilian economy for operational needs.

In the first month of the war in Gaza the army used that power on a scale unseen in years, requisitioning thousands of vehicles to move equipment and supplies.

What was taken was mainly trucks, commercial vehicles, forklifts and heavy engineering equipment, as Israeli business newspaper TheMarker reported in November 2023.

That process predated the 2024 contract. But a forklift working in a private Israeli warehouse is liable to be pressed into military service irrespective of anything the manufacturer has agreed with the defence ministry.

According to Perry though, Toyota has set itself a standard that should not depend on the contract at all.

Toyota Industries, the parent company of Toyota Material Handling and other subsidiaries, maintains a group human rights policy based on the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

It commits the company to "establish and continuously implement a human rights due-diligence process to identify, prevent, mitigate negative impacts on human rights related to our corporate activities", and states that it expects business partners, including suppliers, to support the policy.

Those principles ask companies operating in conflict-affected areas to apply heightened due diligence.

For Perry, Toyota's adoption of that standard matters more than anything else the company has said: it makes the obligation one Toyota accepts rather than one urged on it from outside.

The obvious follow-up, in his view, is whether the company has carried out such an assessment for Israel – and whether it would publish what that assessment found.

MEE asked Toyota whether any such assessment was made before the 2024 contract but did not get an answer.

Perry called the investigation "a good first step in the right direction, for the company to acknowledge a potential oversight and to investigate further", whilst adding that Toyota Material Handling should immediately halt any pending shipments to Israel until its investigation is complete.

"It should publish the results of its investigation and take appropriate actions in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which it says it is committed to.”

That, he said, meant "providing access to remedy to the people and communities whose human rights were negatively impacted", and amending the company's due-diligence process "to ensure that this kind of oversight does not happen again".