President Biden has paused a shipment of bombs to Israel to prevent them from being used in the assault on the city of Rafah. Administration officials said that 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs are being withheld and that the administration is reviewing whether to hold back future transfers.
The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, and it accelerated deliveries after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks. It’s hard to determine just how much Israel has received, but here is a closer look at what we know.
What happened after Oct. 7?
Since Oct. 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 U.S. started to do almost immediately was send an extraordinary flow of weapons,” Mr. Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer, said.
According to a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there were so many arms shipments to Israel that a senior Pentagon official said the Department of Defense sometimes struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver them.
How much has been made public?
Lawmakers and news media have recently criticized the lack of public information about the sales. The Defense Department so far has only published two news releases, on Dec. 9 and 29, about the approval of emergency military sales to Israel, while it lists much of the military equipment sent to Ukraine in a regularly updated fact sheet.
