In his strongest statements yet on the seven-month Gaza war, Joe Biden said the US will block deliveries of weapons that could be fired at Rafah. In the densely populated south of the Gaza Strip, more than a million Palestinians are now sheltering from the violence. At the same time, he emphasized that Washington would still guarantee Israel’s security, such as the Iron Dome missile defense system and Israel’s “ability to respond to attacks” such as from Iran in April.
Israel’s latest orders include ammunition ranging from 113 kilo to 900 kilo bombs. The president now stopped a shipment of 3,500 of these bombs for the first time. This concerns 1,800 bombs of 900 kilos and 1,700 bombs of 225 kilos.
“The symbolism of the American decision is especially important,” says Diederik Cops, senior researcher at the Flemish Peace Institute. “It is the first time since the creation of the state of Israel that the US has taken this position. The Biden administration wants to send a clear signal.”
The key question is whether the restriction will have an immediate impact on the battlefield. “The operational military consequence is still a question mark, but it can certainly have an effect,” says Cops. “Israel carries out a lot of bombing during the Gaza offensive and is also dependent on US munitions for American weapon systems that they cannot find from other suppliers. Their army is in a position of dependency. In the past, they always assumed that nothing could intervene due to their historical interconnectedness.”
Hellfire missiles
For the battlefield, much will depend on how many supplies Israel has built up. Since October 7, Washington has sent tens of thousands of weapons and ammunition to Israel. The aid sent to Israel from October 7 to December 29 alone included, according to The New York Times 52,229 ‘M795 155-millimeter’ artillery shells, 30,000 M4 howitzer propellant charges, 4,792 ‘M107 155-mm’ artillery shells and 13,981 ‘M830A1 120-mm’ tank shells. It also delivered $320 million worth of kits for converting unguided ‘dumb’ bombs into GPS-guided munitions, on top of a previous $403 million order for the same guides. Hellfire missiles for drones have also been delivered. The US also gave Israel access to American military supplies in Israel, where heavy aircraft bombs are located.
In an interview with CNN, Biden admitted for the first time that innocent Palestinians have been killed by their weapons. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a result of our bombs,” he said. The president plans to soon deliver a report to Congress assessing whether his administration believes Israel’s assurances that it has used US weapons in accordance with US and international law.
Israel argues that GPS-guided US systems can prevent civilian casualties, but about eighty House Democrats wrote a letter to Biden last week in which they doubt this. Congress is also increasingly critical of the lack of public information about gun sales. The Pentagon has so far published only two news reports, on December 9 and 29, on the approval of the emergency military sales to Israel, while the military equipment sent to Ukraine is listed in a regularly updated fact sheet. “Substantive details about these contracts are often not provided for the sake of America’s strategic security, because they also include weapon systems that can be positioned against their regional enemies such as Iran,” says Cops.
The financing of military aid to Israel is also legally set in stone. Under the administration of President Barack Obama, the US committed in 2016 to give Israel $38 billion in weapons over ten years. In addition, President Biden signed an aid package last month that also includes $15 billion in additional military aid.
American arms manufacturers do not like to flaunt the profits they make. According to the leading Swedish peace institute SIPRI, Israel accounted for 3.6 percent of US arms exports between 2019-’23. That is a lot for the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu, for whom this volume amounts to no less than 69 percent of its arms imports. Among them are many fighter planes.
Israel was one of the first subscribers to the F-35 program, of which it ordered 75 fighter jets and has already received more than 30. It also ordered $18 billion worth of new F-15s this year, but these will not be delivered until 2029. Biden is now coming under increasing pressure to also freeze these types of deliveries in the long term.
Flanders has been much stricter for some time. According to Cops, there have been no direct deliveries from here since 2006 that could strengthen the strength of the Israeli army, although there is transit through seaports. “What also happens is that products can be supplied to Israeli defense companies if they make something for other armies, including for us, for example,” he says. “As far as we know, Israeli companies are adhering to the foreign end-use agreement because they know they will be in trouble if these components end up in their military. Of course, you can never be one hundred percent sure.”
