Washington quietly flooded Israel with weapons used to ethnically cleanse GazaAs the White House publicly feigns concern for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians by Israel, for the past five months, the Pentagon has delivered tens of thousands of bombs used to flatten the Gaza Strip
News Desk
MAR 7, 2024
 (Photo Credit: Getty Images)
The US government has secretly made over 100 weapons shipments to Israel since 7 October, fueling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by delivering tens of thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms, and other lethal weapons without notifying Congress.
“The administration has organized more than 100 individual transfers of arms to Israel, but has only officially notified Congress of two shipments made under the major foreign weapons sales process, which are usually submitted to lawmakers for review and then publicly disclosed,” US officials who spoke with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed.
US President Joe Biden bypassed Congress to approve the two publicly disclosed arms transfers by invoking an emergency authority. However, to hide dozens of other transfers, the White House relied on “less public mechanisms,” which include “ drawing from US stockpiles, accelerating previously approved deliveries and sending weapons in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress.”
“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior White House official and current president of Refugees International, told the Washington Post.
“This stuff is non-transparent by design,” Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in October in protest of Washington's blind support for Israel's genocide campaign in Gaza, told the WSJ.
“We sort of retroactively build a foreign military sales case, which may or may not need to be notified to Congress, depending on what they took and what quantities … There’s no review of human rights, there’s no review of regional balance, there’s none of the conventional arms transfer policy reviews that would normally happen […] Essentially, it’s take what you can, and we’ll sort it out later,” Paul told The Guardian earlier this year.
The new revelations pointing to Washington's deep complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians come alongside reports in western media claiming Biden is “ considering” taking steps to prevent Israel from using US weapons on a planned offensive in Gaza's southern city of Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians are taking refuge after being violently displaced from their homes.
“If Israel launches an offensive in Rafah without adequately protecting the displaced civilian population, it may precipitate an unprecedented crisis in US-Israel relations, even involving arms supplies,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk is quoted saying by the Washington Post.
With over 30,000 Palestinians killed since 7 October – more than two-thirds of whom are women and children – Washington has continued to provide military and political assistance for Israel, including blocking multiple resolutions at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire, often citing linguistic concerns.
The US government has also stepped in to defend Israel against genocide accusations at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and was at the forefront of cutting funds to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in response to an Israeli smear campaign. |
