Biden Administration Agrees to Ship 500-Pound Bombs to Israel

In May, the U.S. announced that it had held up one shipment that included 2,000-pound bombs and 500-pound bombs. Israel had already sent a ship to Charleston, S.C., to pick up the shipment before the decision was made, a U.S. official said.

President Biden’s decision to hold delivery of certain types of bombs marked an escalation of tensions between his administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the war in Gaza, where more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed since last October, according to Palestinian officials. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants.

The U.S. suspension came in response to Israel’s plans to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah without what the Biden administration regarded as a credible plan to protect civilians. More than one million people had taken shelter there, fleeing fighting in other parts of Gaza. 

Biden had described a major operation in Rafah as a “red line,” but not one that would lead to a total cutoff of U.S. arms supplies.

“Our main concern had been and remains the potential use of 2,000-pound bombs in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza,” a U.S. official said in a statement.  “Because our concern was not about the 500-pound bombs, those are moving forward as part of the usual process.”

The Israelis had argued they needed heavy bombs to destroy tunnels. U.S. officials said that need was outweighed by U.S. concerns about potential civilian deaths when such large bombs are used in densely-populated areas. A spokeswoman at the Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment. 

In its May announcement, the Biden administration said it was “especially focused on the end-use of the 2,000-lb bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza.”

In the weeks after the suspended shipment, U.S. officials began looking for ways to separate the 500-pound bombs to ship them to Israel, which took several weeks, a U.S. official said. The original shipment included 1,800 of heavier bombs and 1,700 of the 500 pound-bombs.

“Other than the one shipment with the 2,000-pound bombs that has been paused and remains paused, weapons shipments continue to move in due course. But we’re not going to get into specifics of every shipment,” a National Security Council spokesman said.  

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time that the shipment of bombs would resume after Israel supplied it with a plan to protect the more than a million civilians seeking refuge in Rafah. The administration has said since there have been fewer civilian deaths in Rafah compared with earlier Israeli operations in Gaza. 

Axios reported last month that the 500-pound bombs would be shipped soon.

During its Rafah operation, Israel seized control of the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, achieving one aim of the war by cutting off what it said was a key route for smuggling weapons. The operation forced a majority of the displaced Gazans in Rafah to flee the city, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

At least 46 Palestinians were killed on May 26 during an Israeli air strike in Tal al-Sultan, a refugee camp in Rafah. The White House said afterward that the strike didn’t cross the “red line” the president had drawn in March during his MSNBC interview. 

“This is an example of the administration folding their hand. They were called out on their bluff of Rafah and now they’re relenting,” said Seth Binder, an expert on U.S. weapons sales abroad and director of advocacy for the Middle East Democracy Center, a policy institute in Washington.

A State Department spokesman said on Monday that it believes the Rafah operation caused fewer civilian casualties than previous phases of the war. Israeli officials have in recent weeks signaled a shift to a lower-intensity phase of the war as it wraps up major operations in Rafah.

Some security analysts said the perceived reduction in civilian deaths could be because of a slower pace of strikes in recent weeks, rather than a change in Israel’s approach to targeting.

“There’s not much evidence of that, but certainly some evidence that the operational tempo is lower,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department official and now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization based in Brussels.

Reducing civilian casualties continues to be a challenge for the Israeli military in Gaza.  An airstrike on Tuesday in the town of Abasan al-Kabira, near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killed at least 25 people and wounded 50 others in a school where thousands of displaced people were sheltering, Palestinian health officials said. 

The Israeli military said it was targeting a Hamas militant in the area and that it was looking into reports of civilian casualties. 

A congressional official said lawmakers hadn’t been notified about the decision to ship the 500-pound bombs. The bombs are part of a deal that had been previously notified to Congress, and there is no formal requirement for reporting individual shipments.

U.S. arms shipments to Israel remain a potent symbol of American support, and potential leverage for the Biden administration.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the U.S. surged arms deliveries to its closest ally in the Middle East, including a delivery of 2,000-pound bombs. Some military experts said the heavy bombs were better suited to attacking military adversaries in open areas, rather than the dense cities of Gaza.

U.S. officials say that weapons deliveries have continued in recent months, though at a slower pace than in the months immediately after the Gaza war began.