Back

The U.S. Has Sent Thousands of Bombs and Missiles to Israel, a Report Found

The New York Times - Thursday, July 25, 2024 by Lara Jakes and |

In his address to Congress on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asked for the speedy delivery of more American weapons to help his country prevail over Hamas in the war in Gaza. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster,” he said.

The prime minister’s plea for more weapons, faster, comes despite enormous transfers of American military hardware over the last 10 months.

A tally of publicly known deliveries, as compiled this week by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, show that more than 20,000 unguided bombs, an estimated 2,600 guided bombs and 3,000 precision missiles — as well as aircraft, ammunition and air defenses — are among the American weapons that already have been shipped since Oct. 7.

Many of the arms shipments that the United States has sent to Israel since the war began in October are classified or have been otherwise kept secret. Nonetheless, what had been delivered by March alone amounts to “an enormous number and variety of weapons, which have played a vital role in helping Israel defend itself,” an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found this past spring.

Read about U.S. arms transfers to Israel since Oct. 7: A tally of publicly known deliveries, as compiled by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

READ DOCUMENT

With Americans divided over U.S. support for the war, and the domestic defense industry already stretched thin by the war in Ukraine, some defense officials and weapons experts have predicted that arms shipments to Israel could soon level off, or be phased out over the next decade.

Human rights groups and some U.S. lawmakers have demanded that the United States stop supplying weapons that could be used by Israel in potential war crimes, though security experts and some members of Congress have argued that ending American military aid would make Israel more vulnerable to attacks by Iran and its regional proxies.

In May, the State Department concluded that Israel had most likely violated humanitarian standards by failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but it did not find specific instances that would justify withholding American military aid.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration halted the shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs to Israel after concerns swelled that such explosives had killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in southern Gaza. President Biden said in May that he would block the delivery of weapons that could be fired into densely populated areas of Rafah, in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians were sheltering.

But this month, Mr. Biden loosened some of the restrictions to allow the delivery of 1,700 500-pound bombs that were part of the paused shipment of 2,000-pound bombs.

The seeming inconsistency has prompted some weapons experts to explore how — or whether — Israel can become less reliant on the United States, in part by building up its own weapons industry. Such development would cost Israel tens of billions of dollars, the F.D.D. analysis said, for a country that already spends around 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense — more than any NATO country.

“It seems unlikely that Israel could attain across-the-board weapons and munitions self-sufficiency anytime soon (and some say ever),” the F.D.D. analysis said.

Originally published by The New York Times.