Australia is manufacturing explosives for Israel’s atrocities

Australia’s complicity in Israel’s atrocities has many ugly layers. It’s worse than the bomb release mechanism on the F-35 death plane. It’s worse than the intelligence gathered at Pine Gap on behalf of a violent supremacist empire. It’s worse than the fascistic assaults on Pro-Palestine speech and protest. It’s not just the relentless propaganda disguised as news, our sellout politicians, or the cultural witch hunts of the Zionist lobby and its commissar, the Special Envoy for ruining writers’ festivals. It is, somehow, even shittier than all of that.

Australia is manufacturing the raw explosive that ends up inside the bombs falling on Gaza, on Lebanon, and on Iran. 

Not the entirety of the bombs. Just the explosive bits. And even Penny Wong wouldn’t have the gall to argue that nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and RDX (known as cyclonite) are the “non-lethal parts” of a bomb. 

Two factories, one in NSW, at Mulwala, and one in Victoria, in Benalla, manufacture the munitions that end up inside the shells, bullets, missiles and bombs used by the US-Israeli death machine in its expansionist, genocidal campaigns. 

“The Australian government knows where the munitions end up. They end up in Israel,” a source inside the global arms supply chain told The Shot under condition of anonymity. 

The two explosive plants are owned by the Australian government and leased out to French arms company Thales. In 2020, under the Morrison Government, Thales signed a $1.1 billion deal to operate the facilities for the next decade. Like a Russian nesting doll of evil corporations, Thales owns a smaller company called Australian Munitions, which oversees the local end of this operation. The raw explosives produced there are said to be of such high quality that they are in demand across the world. 

The munitions plant at Mulwala is gargantuan, staffed by “around 400 people”. This figure reflects a hiring spike of roughly 10 percent since the Gaza genocide intensified in late 2023. Sources say staffing numbers prior to this had remained reasonably flat for a decade, and that explosives and propellant outputs at both factories have increased significantly in the same period. 

The most obvious question anyone should ask at this point is: since 2023, where is the increased demand for this increase in supply coming from? And which single entity is fuelled, almost exclusively at this point, by explosive-driven colonial expansion?

The Mulwala factory churns out munitions 24 hours a day. Staff work through the night. The plant is surrounded by hundreds of hectares of bushland owned by the Department of Defence. It is illegal to be on the premises without permission. The airspace above the factory is restricted. On one of the service tracks around the site, used by the Defence Department and the odd stray kangaroo, you will find this sign.

Under the cover of darkness, these deadly products leave the factories in unmarked tanker trucks, described as “B-doubles”. We are told this is done at night for both safety reasons i.e. fewer cars on the road to crash into and explode, and because there are fewer people to notice anything.

Most of these trucks head to the ports in Australia’s major cities, including Melbourne and Sydney. From there, the munitions are shipped to either the United States (for assembly and on-shipping to Israel), or to Singapore, where South-East Asian based arms dealers purchase the munitions on behalf of the Israeli government. From this trading hub in Singapore, the munitions go on to eviscerate thousands of men, women and children unlucky enough to be born in the path of the Zionist entity.

On the all too rare occasion when Penny Wong, Richard Marles, or Anthony Albanese are asked sticky questions around the issue of supplying the IDF, you might have noticed the common insertion of the word “directly” into their denials, e.g. “We do not sell weapons or ammunition directly to Israel”. This is why. Australia sells explosives to Israel indirectly. 

In her UN report From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, Francessca Albanese explains that the genocide supply chain operates in this disconnected fashion precisely so that complicit Western governments have a degree of arms-length distance from the IDF’s livestreamed, soul-destroying crimes against humanity. “International partnerships providing weaponry and technical support have enhanced Israeli capacity to perpetuate apartheid and, recently, to sustain its assault on Gaza. Israel benefits from the largest-ever defence procurement programme,” she writes. The F-35 program alone involves 1,650 companies across eight different countries. Australia is one of those eight countries. 

Mohamed Duar of Amnesty International Australia warns that, “Australia’s current arms export controls framework is appallingly weak and dangerously opaque. Australians have a right to know. The secrecy surrounding our defence exports undermines Australia’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty and risks entrenching our complicity in genocide. This is morally reprehensible and unacceptable to all Australians who believe in human rights and the protection of innocent lives.”

Raw explosive is not technically classed as arms or armament. Nonetheless, it is still a dangerous thing to put on boats and ship around the world, so it requires various permits. When something is specially designed or modified for military use, it requires a “Part 1” export permit. As you can see from the partial records included below, a number of these permits have been approved to Israel during the period of the Gaza genocide.

At the other end of this deadly supply chain, to support its bomb-fuelled Greater Israel agenda, in recent years the Netanyahu government has invested heavily in the capacity to produce bombs inside Israel using imported explosive materials. These explosive materials are produced in only a small handful of places in the world, Mulwala, Australia being one of them. They are not produced inside Israel.

In March 2026, while touring an Elbit Systems arms factory in Tel Aviv, Amir Baram, Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defence, said: “Months of preparation and early readiness have enabled the IDF to operate with virtually no constraints in Iran and Lebanon… At the same time, we are now working to replenish all munitions expended in order to be prepared for any scenario. The decisions we made to expand and accelerate production lines in Israel before the operation will now allow us to take production rates to the next level.”

Now, these two Australian plants also produce munitions for the Australian Defence Force, and provide for local domestic commercial supply, like mining explosives and shotgun shells for weirdos that want to shoot ducks, that sort of thing. And because of this, the government and Thales have a degree of in-built deniability; I imagine they will try to pass the increase in output and staffing levels off as catering to these other markets. 

Which, while possible, seems highly unlikely. You decide! A sudden boom in the popularity of shooting ducks? Or… In just two years, between October 2023 and October 2025, Israel has dropped more than 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. That is the equivalent of six nuclear bombs worth. And Israel needs to be getting that explosive material from somewhere outside of Israel. 

We are producing more explosives than we ever have, we are licensing permits for military exports to Israel, and sources inside this network have confirmed to The Shot how the explosives are transported, where it is headed, and that the Government is aware of all this.

We have also learnt that the Mulwala plant receives attention from officials highly unlikely to be concerned with the latest in local sports shooting. BAE Systems, a British arms and security company, has a permanent staff member stationed at the plant. NASA has sent officials to visit. And four years ago, several representatives from the Indian Head Naval Base in Maryland, USA, stayed at the factory over several days. Facility employees reportedly thought this visit was unusual under the circumstances of worldwide covid lockdowns.

And I’ll tell you this much for free: I don’t believe the duck hunters have become more bloodthirsty of late, and we certainly aren’t selling these munitions to the Russians.

In the process of clinging onto your humanity and daring to bear witness to atrocity, understand that today, as Israel violates yet another “ceasefire”, the shredded children that have returned to your social media feeds are being shredded by Australian made explosives, and that a bunch of terrible people are getting extremely rich in the process.