TEL AVIV — Israel and Greece signed a $3.5 billion defense agreement Monday, their largest-ever bilateral arms deal, giving Greece a complete air defense system built on Israeli technology and covering threats from ballistic missiles to drones.
Israel's Defense Ministry announced the deal under the name Achilles Shield. It marks the first time Israel has provided a foreign buyer with a full, integrated array of weapons systems against the complete spectrum of modern aerial threats.
The package includes David's Sling, a medium-to-long-range interceptor system designed to defeat ballistic missiles and large-caliber rockets, as well as the SPYDER surface-to-air missile system, which targets aircraft, cruise missiles and drones at short-to-medium range. A new national command and control system ties the components together. A separate contract worth $30 million was signed for Rafael's Drone Dome systems, a dedicated counter-drone platform.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement: "Israel and Greece share common strategic interests and face shared regional challenges. At a time when actors with hegemonic ambitions are seeking to expand their influence and undermine stability in the region."
Greece's Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said: "Modern conflicts have already altered the parameters of military defense and deterrence. Technology, ballistic missiles, satellite communications, unmanned systems, cyber threats, hybrid forms of warfare and the interconnection of fields of operations have long rendered preexisting defense doctrines completely unrealistic."
The deal fits a strategic logic for Greece. Athens has long-running disputes with Turkey over sea boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean. Both countries are NATO members, which complicates how Greece can raise the disputes within the alliance. Greece has responded by steadily modernizing its armed forces. The Achilles Shield agreement accelerates that modernization with a system designed to defend Greek airspace against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones that define contemporary regional warfare.
The two countries have built toward this point over a decade. Earlier deals included a $1.65 billion contract with Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems to construct a flight training school in southern Greece. Greece has also agreed to purchase Israeli rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missiles and drones in prior rounds of procurement. Monday's agreement is categorically larger and more comprehensive than any that came before it.
The signing occurs as Israeli arms exports reach record levels. Israel's defense exports reached more than $19 billion last year, a 30 percent increase from 2024, according to Israel's Defense Ministry. More than half of those sales were in missiles, rockets and air-defense systems — the product category at the center of the Achilles Shield deal.
The export surge has continued despite sustained international criticism of Israel's military conduct in Gaza and in its conflicts with Hezbollah and Iran. Analysts who track the global arms trade say foreign governments keep buying Israeli systems because those systems are battle-tested: buyers can observe in real time how the weapons perform in active combat, giving Israeli products a credibility advantage over systems that have not seen recent conflict.
A March report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found Israel has surpassed the United Kingdom in global arms export market share, placing Israel seventh among the world's largest weapons suppliers. The Achilles Shield deal is one of the transactions driving that ranking.
For Greece, the agreement extends a defense partnership that has become one of its most consequential outside NATO's formal procurement structures. The combination of David's Sling, SPYDER and the new national command and control system gives Greek air defenses a layered architecture — each system handling different threat altitudes and ranges — rather than dependence on a single interceptor platform.
