US to rush weapons to Israel amid planned invasion of Rafah: Report

The administration of US President Joe Biden is reportedly preparing to send “tens of millions of dollars” worth of bombs and weapons to Israel in continuation of Washington’s untrammeled support for the occupying regime’s months-long war on Gaza.

Citing unnamed US officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the proposed arms delivery includes MK-82 bombs and KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), which add precision guidance to bombs, and FMU-139 bomb fuses.

The report cited an assessment of the proposed arms transfer drafted by the US embassy in the occupied al-Quds as claiming that the Israeli regime had requested “rapid acquisition of these items for the defense of Israel against continued and emerging regional threats.”

The proposed delivery is still being internally reviewed by the Biden administration, the American journal added, citing a US official, who said the details of the proposal could change before the White House notifies congressional committee leaders who would need to approve the transfer.

Since December 2023, Washington has twice skipped congressional review of weapons sale to Israel as the regime’s brutal aggression against Palestinians in Gaza lingers on for more than four months with some 100,000 casualties.

According to the US journal, Biden has provided roughly 21,000 precision-guided munitions to Israel since the start of the war last October.

The report said the remaining weapons are enough to sustain 19 weeks of bombing Gaza but that would shrink to days if Tel Aviv also launches a full assault on Lebanon, from which the regime has come under harsh retaliatory attack by the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah.

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The arms transfer comes as Biden claimed on Friday to have been repeatedly pushing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a “temporary ceasefire” in Gaza.

In defiance of widespread international calls, the Israeli regime has insisted on an imminent launch of a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip with an estimated 1.4 million of the enclave’s 2.3 million population that has been forcibly displaced over the past four months.

More than 28,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and over 68,000 others injured since the Israeli regime launched its US-backed onslaught on Gaza on October 7, 2023.

The United States, Israel’s biggest ally, has provided Israel with a raft of arms and ammunition since the initiation of the Gaza war and also vetoed UN Security Council resolutions that called on the regime to cease its aggression.

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