The American executive notified Congress on Tuesday that it would deliver weapons to Israel worth around a billion dollars, AFP learned from sources familiar with the matter, a week after Joe Biden threatened to limit American military aid to its ally regarding Rafah.
Congress must still approve the arms delivery, a US official said, with a parliamentary source indicating the total amount is around $1 billion.
According to Wall Street Journalwhich first revealed the information, this delivery includes 700 million dollars of tank ammunition and 500 million for tactical military vehicles.
This aid package is spent within the immense American aid plan for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, totaling $95 billion, including $13 billion for Israel, voted by Congress at the end of April .
The Biden administration has tirelessly called, for months, on parliamentarians to approve these billions for Washington’s allies.
On Wednesday May 8, Joe Biden, however, said “that he would not deliver” certain weapons to Israel, of which the United States is the primary military supporter, in particular “artillery shells”, in the event of a major offensive against Rafah, an unprecedented warning from Washington.
“If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone,” replied Mr. Netanyahu the day after the American threats, with an Israeli army spokesperson saying that they had “enough weapons to accomplish [leur] mission to Rafah.
Tuesday morning, strikes by the Israeli army targeted different sectors of the Gaza Strip, including Rafah, a town in the far south of the territory where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are displaced, are crowded together. Fierce fighting is taking place in eastern Rafah, located on Israel’s southern border, where the army entered with tanks on May 7.
In Washington, left-wing elected officials in Congress could try to derail this arms delivery to Israel.
Since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, the United States has made public two sales under the so-called “emergency” procedure to its ally – a procedure which allows a direct shipment, bypassing a process of 30 days in Congress