Member-only story
Ramadan coming. Gazans starving. U.S. policy in chaos. Hamas sketches political future.
These past couple of days have seen several important revelations and analyses related to Israel’s still-continuing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. I don’t have time to delve deeply into any of them. But here, to help establish a record, is information about four such revelations/analyses that I see as most consequential:
- The WaPo’s (still incomplete) revelations about the scale of Washington’s recent arms transfers to Israel
- Biden admin whisperer reveals the chaos in U.S. policy
- The humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially in the north, worsens
- Spox Dr. Khaled Qadomi lays out Hamas’s negotiating terms
The WaPo’s (still incomplete) revelations about the scale of Washington’s recent arms transfers to Israel
This report appeared on the WaPo’s website yesterday. The lede was:
The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.
The reporter there, John Hudson, who presumably got leaked to by someone in one of the briefed congressional offices, notes that the administration did notify Congress and the public about two arms transfers to Israel since October 7: “$106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of components needed to make 155 mm shells.”
But, Hudson writes,
[I]n the case of the 100 other transactions… the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress…
We might conclude, therefore, that that “dollar amount” could well be $100 million… and also, that all the other “more than 100” arms transfers had been carefully configured to each, individually, fall somewhere just under that sum (to avoid the necessity of public…
