Biden plans to send $1bn arms shipment to Israel
Biden plans to send $1bn arms shipment to Israel
The weapons transfer comes as Israeli tanks were spotted advancing deeper into residential areas of Rafah.
spoiler
The White House has told Congress it wants to send more than $1bn (£800m) in new weapons to Israel.
This comes despite the US being opposed to a full-scale invasion by the Israeli military on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
It said last week it had paused a shipment of bombs to Israel over concerns civilians would be killed if used in densely populated areas.
The new package, confirmed by US media, must still be approved by lawmakers.
It would include $700m in tank ammunition, $500m in tactical vehicles and $60m in mortar rounds, according to the Associated Press news agency.
This is separate from a bill passed by Congress last month providing $95bn in aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.
On Tuesday, Israeli tanks advanced deeper into residential areas in the south-east of Rafah and are thought to be about a mile from the centre.
Meanwhile, medical services are dwindling. Aid agency Doctors Without Borders told the BBC they had stopped operating at one of the area's field hospitals because it was too dangerous to stay.
It is not known when Congress would consider the new arms deal but it it likely to spark objections from some members.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen was critical of the decision and told the Washington Post the US should not proceed with any additional arms transfers until the Netanyahu government had met President Biden's concerns about Rafah and the provision of humanitarian assistance.
A US state department report last week found that some American-made weapons provided to Israel may have been used in breach of international law.
While the report was a clear rebuke of some Israeli operations in Gaza, it stopped short of definitively saying that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign had breached international law.
It added that assurances it had received from Israel about adhering to the legal use of US weapons were "credible and reliable".
The package being sent to Congress is the first since Mr Biden's administration paused arms transfers to Israel last week.
He said he had delayed the shipment of 2,000lb (900kg) bombs to Israel because of how they might be used in such a ground operation.
Asked by CNN about the delay, Mr Biden said: "Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs."
Weapons transfers to Israel have become a political liability for Mr Biden ahead of this November's 2024 White House election.
News of the latest arms package emerged soon after voting ended in a presidential primary election in Maryland, where activists had urged voters to register a protest ballot against what they see as Mr Biden's favouritism towards Israel over the Gaza war.
Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation intended to prevent any further pauses in weapons shipments to the US ally.
The House of Representatives this week will vote on a measure that requires the state department and defence department to ensure the "prompt delivery" of military equipment.
The White House has vowed to veto the bill, if it manages to pass the Senate, which is unlikely.
Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group's cross-border attack on southern Israel on 7 October, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 252 others were taken hostage.
More than 35,170 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 82 in the past 24 hours, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.
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there's a berniecrat house dem in my district who is coming up for re-election. Reading their website it's like support for everything Bernie was going for in 2020 and more. Then I see they voted to give 20 billion dollars to israel and I'm like nah ain't voting for this dickhead
A candidate has to be a vocal anti-Zionist for me to even consider voting for them now. Zionists are feral and I don't trust such genocidal freaks with any amount of power.
Honestly, the bare minimum I’ll accept is “Stop giving money and weapons,” and I’ll only phone bank if they’re calling for bombing Tel Aviv
It's incredibly hard to avoid flailing into conspiracy theories (conspiracy theory 1: this is all by design to induce conspiratorial thinking...), but I have been struggling for months now to understand why the fuck people like you described, classic "progressive except for Palestine" types haven't just dumped Israel. This is the golden opportunity. Israel has permanently lost US public support, dwindling by the day as boomers die.
You can be the "cool guy, who understands the kids!" and press on straight Nazis like robo-legs, no-dick-McGee or even... I was gonna keep making references but I'll leave it at the movie "The Goonies" and a character in it that resembles a US senator.
Yes AIPAC would fuck your ass, but they're gonna do that anyway. AIPAC goes after all the progressives and not for Israel shit all the time. They're just pro-fascism. Which makes sense considering it's a fucking lobby for a fascist state. If you're a liberal and lean at all to the left, you should be running directly against everything AIPAC backs. Obviously that means against Israel, but also all the other right wing shit AIPAC has backed.
It's just purely illogical and the only non-conspiracy conclusion is that DC is in such a bubble that they... don't see, somehow?... the polling, they can't see the obvious direction things are headed and most importantly I suppose, these are dipshit liberals, like Bernie (sorry, I will always like Bernie but he's a dipshit liberal- just our best liberal), who lack any integrity, fortitude, or even ideology.
"I just want cushcush jobby until I'm also 80."
That's all it is. Which is simultaneously obvious to everyone but also easily forgotten, even by myself, because we assume people in these jobs are there for literally any of the reasons they claim... but they aren't. They want the cushy powerful job, nepo hookups for their family, and they don't give a single shit about anything else. Unfortunately for the entire rest of the world it blinds them all to the reality that they are shitting in their own lunchbox right now with Palestine. And they've already shat the lunchbox on many other issues in the last few years/decades that could've kept the ship they suck from floating... too stupid to grift basically.
The basic answer is because it's easy. You can either vote the same way everybody else does on a bill that will pass with overwhelming margins or you can lodge your insignificant protest vote and face weeks of media outrage that you're an antisemite, recall petitions if those exist, steamed hams showing up to your town hall events to yell at you, death threats, other congresspeople not wanting to sign on to your bills, whatever. The blowback from standing against the MIC is so high that you are turned into a pariah overnight.
Maybe the dam will break at some point and a bunch of these progressive types will break from israel all at once. Impossible to predict when that will be though.
DC is in such a bubble that they... don't see, somehow?
I don't know how much this is the answer relative to other factors.
But I will say that DC is the only place I've ever been with an even bigger reality distortion field around it than the SF Bay area.
Exactly the same weird conversations between people trying to convince each other they're visionary tech luminaries who know what the next big thing is, yet can't immediately tell NFTs are a scam. But in DC they're trying to convince each other they know what the trends of world politics are.
Fetterman is my prime example of this. Like, dude, what the fuck is going on? You ran as a progressive and are now so loudly supporting this genocide that your constituents are almost universally appalled by. Supporting Israel is not a winning strategy for you dude! What’re we doing??
New rotating villain since mansion and cinema are done.
There's no grand conspiracy like you said. But there is also no confusion, no bubble. They see things clearly, clearer than anyone outside DC, clearer than you and me.
No politician would survive attacking AIPAC because the other lobbies, who together control our politicians as surely as they control the rest of our lives will pull together to crush them.
A new D politician has a choice one they're in their seat. They can go against the DNC and the lobbyists whose money and support hey need to continue to keep it, facing attack ads, death threats, and a primary against their own party.
OR!
They just have to do what they're told by the lobbyists who got them power and they get a chance at the grift trough.
There is no third option. This is the state of our democracy
For those people it's a lot of the Lobby and being primaried and having a million dollars in PAC money spent advertising their Zionist opponent.
At the top level, ultimately Israel probably has the "family jewels" of US state criminality. A lot of shit got outsourced to Mossad.
If you promise me that mossad will leak all the compromising material they may or may not hold on every politician... well, time for me to triple down
Let a million "Trump piss video"-style take downs bloom!
(Except be real. And leak the fucking shit)