When the Israeli Air Force unleashed its most destructive air campaign in history on the besieged Gaza Strip, the bombs that leveled neighbourhoods, hospitals and refugee camps were packed with an explosive that originated thousands of kilometres away in the forests of northeast Poland.
According to a new investigation titled “The Missing Ingredient: Polish TNT,” the state-owned Polish company Nitro-Chem—Europe’s largest producer of trinitrotoluene (TNT)—has quietly become one of the most critical suppliers of explosive material for U.S.-made Mark-series aerial bombs, the very munitions used extensively by Israel since October 2023.
The report argues that without Nitro-Chem’s production capacity, Israel could not have sustained the scale of bombardment that has turned much of Gaza into rubble.
A Supply Chain Hidden in Plain Sight
For years, Nitro-Chem has exported enormous quantities of TNT to the United States, where weapons giant General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems uses it to assemble Mk-80 series bombs. These include the Mk-83 (1,000 lb) and Mk-84 (2,000 lb), the heaviest, most destructive weapons in Israel’s arsenal.
The investigation finds that Nitro-Chem supplied around 90 percent of the TNT imported by the U.S. in recent years for these bomb lines.
Nitro-Chem’s role is well documented: it has repeatedly signed large contracts to deliver bulk TNT to U.S. intermediaries who convert the raw explosive into finished weapons. In 2025, the Polish company secured a record contract to supply 18,000 tons of TNT over a three-year period, worth more than $300 million.
From there, the explosives move into a well-oiled U.S.–Israel pipeline. American facilities fill and finish the bombs, which are then shipped to Israel and loaded onto F-15s, F-16s and F-35s before being dropped over Gaza.
The Scale of the Bombardment
The TNT report compiles military and governmental data to quantify what this supply chain means for Gaza.
- Between October 2023 and late 2024, Israel dropped more than 85,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip.
- By April 2024, the total tonnage already exceeded 70,000 tons—more than the combined bomb tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London during World War II.
- In the first two months alone, Israel dropped 29,000 air-to-ground munitions, including more than 10,000 unguided “dumb bombs”—many of them Mk-80 series.
- By late August 2024, the Israeli Air Force had dropped around 50,000 bombs, rockets and missiles, with approximately two-thirds of them being two-thousand-pound Mk-84-type bombs.
Each Mk-84 typically contains around 428 kilograms of tritonal, a TNT-based explosive with an exceptionally high blast radius. The report estimates that by April 2024, the total TNT-equivalent detonated over Gaza had reached 75,000 tons—roughly equivalent to a 75-kiloton nuclear blast, more than twice the combined explosive power of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, the result was inevitable.
Counting the Dead
Humanitarian groups and independent analysts now estimate that nearly 67,000 people had been killed in Gaza by early October 2025, with many tens of thousands more injured. Roughly 80 percent of those killed were civilians.
Children accounted for an extraordinary share of the dead. Throughout 2024, nearly one-third to one-half of those killed in Israeli airstrikes were children, with women making up another large portion.
The vast majority of these deaths were caused by air-dropped bombs, not ground combat. Military analysts describe Israel’s bombing of Gaza as a civilian “punishment campaign” unrivalled in recent decades.
A Dark Historical Irony
The Nitro-Chem factory in northeastern Poland sits on the site of a vast Nazi arms complex built during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944. During the war, Polish resistance fighters repeatedly infiltrated the facility to sabotage production for the Wehrmacht.
Today, TNT produced on that same soil is transported along routes that pass Holocaust memorials—including the Valley of Death mass grave and the former Potulice concentration camp—before eventually ending up in bombs that have flattened Palestinian neighbourhoods.
The authors of the TNT report highlight this disturbing symmetry: explosives once manufactured under military occupation are now being linked to what prominent legal experts describe as a modern genocidal assault.
How Much Money Does the U.S. Make From Polish TNT?
The economics of the arms trade form an essential part of this story.
1. The Polish Input
Nitro-Chem’s TNT contract with the United States—worth roughly $310 million for 18,000 tons of TNT—suggests an average price of around $17,000 per ton.
Each Mk-84 bomb contains roughly $7,000–8,000 worth of TNT, based on this pricing.
2. The U.S. Output
The United States then sells these bombs to Israel at a far higher price.
In February 2025, Washington approved an arms package to Israel that included:
- 35,529 Mk-84 or BLU-117 general-purpose bomb bodies
- 4,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads
- Plus associated equipment and support
The estimated value of this single package: $2.04 billion.
Additional emergency packages in the same period—worth at least $2.7 billion—included more Mk-84s, Mk-83s, BLU-110 bombs and thousands of JDAM guidance kits.
Together, the U.S. sold at least $4.7 billion worth of bombs and warheads to Israel in just a two-year span—many of them requiring Nitro-Chem-produced TNT.
3. The Markup
A modern guided Mk-84 typically sells for $50,000–$60,000 once guidance kits, labour, machining and overheads are included.
Comparing the two parts of the chain:
- Input: roughly $7k worth of Polish TNT per bomb
- Output: roughly $50–60k per finished bomb
Even accounting for manufacturing costs, transport, guidance systems and administrative overheads, the U.S. bomb-making industry captures a mark-up of several hundred percent.
Poland supplies the cheap explosive feedstock.
American defense contractors capture the billions.
Legal and Political Fallout
Human rights lawyers argue that Poland’s role in supplying TNT used in Israeli bombs could expose it to charges of aiding and abetting genocide. The TNT report warns that continuing these shipments may constitute a violation of international criminal law.
The report calls on Poland and Nitro-Chem to immediately halt TNT exports bound for bombs and artillery used by Israel. But it also raises pointed questions about responsibility within the broader transatlantic supply chain.
If the U.S. is earning billions of dollars from weapons whose core explosive material is produced on the site of a former Nazi factory—and these weapons are being used to kill tens of thousands of civilians—then the moral and political burden is shared.
A War Built on Global Complicity
Israel’s bombing of Gaza is not simply the product of pilots, drones or generals. It is the end point of a global supply chain involving Polish industrial facilities, American weapons assembly plants and a network of political agreements and military alliances.
From a TNT plant on a former Nazi weapons complex to bomb factories in Texas and Oklahoma to Israeli jets over Gaza, the journey of each explosive device reveals a system of transnational complicity.
The numbers—tens of thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of tons of explosives, tens of thousands of civilians killed, and billions of dollars earned—paint a clear picture.
Polish TNT is the raw ingredient. American contractors refine it into profit. And Palestinian civilians pay the price.