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.
Pete Nguyen, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an email that recent assistance has included precision-guided munitions, artillery ammunition, medical supplies and “other categories of critical equipment.”
He added that “the United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks.”
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.
As laid out in those news releases, the aid sent to Israel from Oct. 7 to Dec. 29 included 52,229 M795 155-millimeter artillery shells, 30,000 M4 propelling charges for howitzers, 4,792 M107 155-mm artillery shells and 13,981 M830A1 120-mm tank rounds.
But the State Department can legally refrain from telling Congress and the public about some new arms orders placed by Israel since Oct. 7 because they fall below a certain dollar amount.
The Washington Post reported that the United States had approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since Oct. 7.
What did they send?
One sale approved in late October allows for the sale to Israel of $320 million in kits for converting unguided “dumb” bombs into GPS-guided munitions, on top of a previous, $403 million order for the same guidance kits.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies compiled a list of news reports and official information available about the weapons delivered. According to the reports, that included air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, artillery shells, tank rounds, small arms, Hellfire missiles used by drones, 30-mm cannon ammunition, PVS-14 night vision devices and disposable shoulder-fired rockets.
The Pentagon leased its two Israeli-made Iron Dome antimissile batteries back to Israel, according to the website Breaking Defense.
The U.S. also gave Israel access to the U.S. military stockpiles in Israel for immediate needs. An American official said that Israel’s recently requested munitions from those stockpiles have included bombs ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds, and that many have been 500-pound bombs.
How is it funded?
The military aid to Israel is funded under a 2016 agreement known as a memorandum of understanding that committed the United States to giving Israel $38 billion in weapons over 10 years.
Additionally, President Biden last month signed an aid package that will send about $15 billion in additional military aid.
Israel regularly receives arms from the Defense Department and from American weapons makers directly, which included the unguided and guided bombs that Israel has bought from the United States over the years and dropped on Gaza in recent months, and also fighter jets, air defense missiles and helicopters.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. military aid to Israel has amounted to $216 billion since Israel’s founding in 1948.
John Ismay contributed reporting.