President Biden has stopped a shipment of bombs to Israel to prevent them from being used in the assault on the city of Rafah. Administration officials said 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs are being held and that the administration is reviewing whether to withhold future transfers.
The United States is by far the largest supplier of weapons to Israel and accelerated deliveries after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. It’s difficult to determine how much Israel has received, but here’s a closer look at what we know.
What happened after October 7?
Since October 7, the United States has sent tens of thousands of weapons to Israel. For the most part, it accelerated supplies that were already committed under contracts, many of which were approved by Congress and the State Department long ago, according to Bradley. Bowman, a military expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
“What the United States began to do almost immediately was send an extraordinary flow of weapons,” said Bowman, a former US military officer.
According to a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there were so many weapons shipments to Israel that a senior Pentagon official said the Defense Department sometimes had difficulty finding enough cargo planes to deliver them.
How much has been made public?
Lawmakers and the media have recently criticized the lack of public information about the sales. So far, the Defense Department has only issued two press releases, on Dec. 9 and Dec. 29, about approving emergency military sales to Israel, while listing much of the military equipment sent to Ukraine in a regularly updated fact sheet. .
As stated in those press releases, aid sent to Israel from October 7 to December 29 included 52,229 M795 155-millimeter artillery shells, 30,000 M4 howitzer propellant charges, 4,792 M107 155-mm artillery shells, and 13,981 M830A1 120mm. tank rounds.