Israel’s arms sales are surging. So why are its weapons expos smaller than ever?
Attendees at the Defense Tech Expo in Tel Aviv, 17 February 2026
Sahar Vardi writes in +972 on 23 February 2026:
The Defense Tech Expo, hosted over two days last week at a convention center in Tel Aviv, was Israel’s largest weapons exhibition since the beginning of its war of annihilation in Gaza. Sponsored by Israel Aerospace Industries, it welcomed dozens of Israeli arms and security companies to show off their latest technological advances to prospective buyers from around the world.
Greeted at the entrance with complimentary champagne, international delegations moved between the different booths with their translators, stopping to listen to each company’s sales pitch. At one of the larger displays organized by the company Smart Shooter, an Israeli teenager — probably just before military service — played with a rifle, looking through the sight and marveling at the promise of what it could do: shoot down drones, chase moving targets, and turn every soldier into a sharpshooter.
As if to showcase the absurd reality of Israel in 2026, the exhibition took place in the very same pavilion that only a day earlier had played host to a conference on how to treat trauma in the shadow of the war. As trauma experts discussed their ideas, staff at the convention center were busy laying out missiles and drones in preparation for an exhibition aimed at selling more of the weapons that made this war possible.
The exhibition represented something of a paradox: While Israeli arms sales have surged by more than 18 percent since 2022, this year’s conference was significantly smaller than its counterparts prior to 2023.
For comparison, the most recent iteration of ISDEF, Israel’s largest arms exhibition, which was held in 2022, boasted 12,000 visitors and delegations from 36 countries. Official numbers for this year’s Defence Tech Expo have not yet been published, but the hall inside the convention center that hosted it accommodates only 450 participants. Moreover, according to a leaked internal document, organizers appear to have struggled to even bring the roughly 20 international delegations that were invited to attend, with several of them seeming not to show up at all.
Walking around the exhibition, one could easily notice far fewer attendees and official delegations from foreign states, and generally much less English spoken. The overwhelming majority of attendees were Israelis — from companies hoping to sell their latest wares, or to scout out the competition from other companies — but not the foreign state procurement delegations that were once the core of these exhibitions.