The US has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since its attack began on the Gaza Strip, according to a Washington Post report.
US officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing that this amounts to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, the newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The paper stated that the “triple-digit figure, which has not been previously reported, is the latest indication of Washington’s extensive involvement” in the war on Gaza.
It comes even as top US officials and lawmakers express deep reservations about Israel’s military tactics in Gaza, the paper said.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 30,800 Palestinians have been killed, and 72,298 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
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The report by the Washington Post further stated that “only two approved foreign military sales to Israel have been made public since the start of conflict: $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of components needed to make 155 mm shells.”
Those sales were criticized because the Biden administration bypassed Congress to approve the packages by invoking an emergency authority, the paper explained.
‘Foreign Military Sales’
The report further pointed out that “in the case of the 100 other transactions, known in government-speak as Foreign Military Sales or FMS, the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate.”
Anonymous US officials and lawmakers told the paper that this is “because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress.”
The report further quotes Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy as having said that “The arms transfer process lacks transparency by design.”
He said the transfers “is something we deserve to know as citizens of a democracy.”
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The transfers since October 7 were largely financed by the more than $3.3 billion in US taxpayer funds that Washington provides to Israel every year, the paper said.
It added that a senior State Department official “declined to provide the total number or cost of all US arms transferred to Israel since Oct. 7” but described them as a mix of new sales and “active FMS cases.”
Women, Children Killed
In addition to the total number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s military assault on the besieged enclave, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.
Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire.’
(The Palestine Chronicle)
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