Azerbaijan has vowed to Israel that it will continue supplying the country with oil, despite officially halting oil sales last year, according to a report in Haaretz.
Baku recently removed oil sales to Israel from its customs records, after steady year-on-year increases in exports to the country which had reached over a million tons in 2024.
According to the records, exports to Israel stopped in October amid the war on Gaza.
However, Israeli sources told Haaretz that the sales have continued, and that the change in customs records may be due to the transactions being made to traders registered in third countries.
“We received a promise from the Azerbaijanis that the strategic relations will continue, including in the energy sector, and we have nothing to worry about,” one source said.
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Two Israeli sources said that the halt on sales in October was driven by pressure from Turkey, Baku’s most important political and military ally.
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The Turkish pressure, Haaretz reported, is partly due to the fact that Azerbaijani oil exported to Israel is carried by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, running through Turkey.
Ankara cut trade ties with Israel in May last year over the war on Gaza and Israeli refusal to allow Turkey to airdrop humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Several Turkish opposition parties and voices have protested against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, accusing it of continuing to supply Israel with Azerbaijani oil.
Protests have also taken place outside the Istanbul office of Socar, Azerbaijan’s state oil company.
The Israeli source told Haaretz: “Even if Azerbaijan stops exporting oil to Israel, we will not collapse. We will bring it from somewhere else.
“But they want to balance the situation in which they are dependent only on us, from a security perspective.”
Tankers turning off tracking signal
Israel provided military and diplomatic assistance to Azerbaijan in its offensive against Armenia in September 2023, which resulted in an Azerbaijani takeover of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Ilham Shaban, the chairman of the Azerbaijani Caspian Barrel Oil Research Centre, told Haaretz that by selling oil through individuals, it can avoid publicising that the exports eventually end up in Israel.
He said that Baku could then claim that the sales do “not fuel the planes that annihilate Palestinian children”.
Analysis in November found evidence of “systemised trade” in crude oil between Turkey and Israel, despite Ankara’s trade embargo over the war.
The Stop Fuelling Genocide campaign released evidence that suggested that the Seavigour tanker shipped crude oil from Turkey’s Ceyhan port to a pipeline near Ashkelon in Israel.
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The port is the last stop on the BP-owned Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
The oil is then shipped from the Heydar Aliyev Terminal at Ceyhan to Israel, accounting for almost 30 percent of its crude oil imports.
The researchers tracked 10 journeys made in 2024 by the Kimolos tanker between Ceyhan and Ashkelon, with eight of them occurring after Turkey announced its embargo in May.
Despite the ship turning off its tracking signal for several days in the Eastern Mediterranean to mask its route, the researchers managed to identify it as docking in Israel 10 times using satellite imagery.
Port logs for the Kimolos reveal that on a typical trip to Israel, the tanker is registered as being bound for Egypt, leaving with a full load of oil. But the tanker does not dock in Egypt, instead “disappearing” for a few days in the Eastern Mediterranean.
This strategy follows a similar pattern to that of the Seavigour, which also turned off its location transponder and reappeared in Sicily days later.
The Turkish energy ministry has repeatedly denied that any oil tankers bound for Israel have left Ceyhan since May, stating that “companies transporting oil through the BTC pipeline for export to global markets from Haydar Aliyev Terminal have respected Turkiye’s recent decision not to engage in trade with Israel”.
Middle East Eye previously reported that the advocacy group Oil Change International, which authored a report tracking oil shipments to Israel up until July 2024, said its data sources showed multiple shipments from Ceyhan since May.
A Turkish official previously told MEE that BP sells oil to intermediary companies, which Ankara cannot control, and tankers pick up the oil “without declaring their final destination”.
