More than $15 million in research funding linked to Israel's Ministry of Defence and Israeli weapons manufacturers was unreported or inconsistently recorded in US foreign-funding databases, according to an investigation drawing on university and government audit records spanning two decades.

The investigation, published by Drop Site News and based partly on research compiled by the Antiwar Initiative, examined state and university audits, foreign-funding disclosures and other institutional records covering the period from 2004 to 2025.

It identified financial relationships involving the Israeli defence ministry or Israeli defence companies and universities including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Connecticut, Maryland, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The records do not establish that all of the money originated with the Israeli government. In some cases, the Israeli Ministry of Defence acted as an intermediary for funding originating with the US Department of Defense — a distinction explicitly acknowledged by MIT in its own account of its Israeli defence-linked research.

That distinction is important because US universities are subject to federal disclosure requirements for certain foreign gifts and contracts. Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, institutions receiving federal financial assistance must disclose foreign-source gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more annually.

The Department of Education said in February that US universities disclosed more than 8,300 foreign-funding transactions worth $5.2 billion for 2025. It also said more than $2 billion in reportable gifts and contracts had been reported late between February and December 2025.

Research with potential military applications

The Israeli-linked projects identified in the investigation covered fields including video surveillance, human-activity recognition, autonomous flight, magnetic sensing, data analysis and modelling the impact of projectiles.

At the University of Connecticut, audit records cited in the investigation showed approximately $668,000 for a project described as research into predicting the impact of short- and medium-range projectiles over nine financial years between 2013 and 2023. Another project involving highly sensitive magnetic-field detection received more than $251,000.

Records reviewed by investigators also identified about $799,000 in projects linked to the Israeli Ministry of Defence at Columbia University.

The Research Foundation for the State University of New York recorded five Israeli defence ministry-linked projects worth about $950,000 between 2010 and 2021, while Florida state audits recorded approximately $1.19 million in expenditures passing through the Israeli ministry between 2012 and 2021. The Florida records did not identify every university receiving the money.

At Princeton, records cited in the investigation showed a $600,000 contract for research into a “Pulsed Scalar Atomic Magnetometer”, sponsored by Israel's Ministry of Defence and the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

University of Maryland researchers received $150,000 for work involving autonomous micro-helicopters and another $300,000 for research into high-speed rotorcraft flight, according to the records.

MIT confirms US origin of some funding

MIT's relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence became a major point of contention during pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2024.

The university says it received just under $4 million between the 2015 and 2024 financial years for individual projects involving the Israeli ministry, followed by another $290,000 in 2025.

MIT disputes claims that this money should simply be described as Israeli government funding.

“The funds originate from the U.S. Department of Defense,” the university says in its published account of the projects. According to MIT, the money passed through a US cooperative programme with Israel's Ministry of Defence, and the research involved collaborators at Israeli universities.

MIT also says the research is open and publishable and that its results are available to researchers generally rather than being restricted to Israel.

The university said three Israeli defence ministry-linked awards remained active when it last updated its public explanation, with approximately $180,000 in funding remaining.

Israeli weapons companies

The investigation also identified funding involving Israeli defence companies, including Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.

At the University of Texas at Dallas, researchers developed a video-surveillance system with funding from Elbit Systems of America, according to records cited by the investigation. Other projects involved algorithms designed to recognise human activity and identify objects in video.

The investigation raises a separate transparency question from whether the research itself was lawful: whether defence-linked financial relationships were consistently captured by the federal system intended to disclose foreign money flowing into US higher education.

Federal rules do not require every individual foreign payment to appear as a separate Section 117 disclosure. The reporting requirement generally applies when an institution receives gifts or enters contracts with a foreign source reaching the statutory $250,000 threshold in a calendar year.

That means the absence of an individual grant from the federal database does not by itself establish that a university violated disclosure law.

The investigation's findings have nevertheless renewed scrutiny of relationships between US universities and Israel's defence establishment, which became a central demand of some campus protests after the Gaza war began in October 2023.

At MIT, protesters specifically demanded an end to projects sponsored through the Israeli Ministry of Defence. The university rejected demands to terminate individual researchers' active agreements, saying doing so would infringe academic freedom when the projects complied with US law and university policy.

The federal government, meanwhile, has recently increased scrutiny of foreign money at American universities. The Education Department launched a revamped foreign-funding reporting portal in January 2026 and says it has made enforcement of Section 117 a priority.