Trump administration plans $2.8bn sale of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel

The Trump administration is preparing to sell Israel a $2.8bn package of 907kg (2,000-pound) bombs, the largest single sale of the munition in recent years, according to reports by The Washington Post and the AFP news agency.

The package, funded through Foreign Military Financing – a mechanism in which Washington provides the money Israel then uses to buy US weapons – includes 40,000 bombs: 20,000 MK-84 general-purpose bombs and 20,000 BLU-117s, a thermally coated variant of the MK-84 designed for safer naval storage, along with I-2000 Penetrator warheads built to strike hardened, underground structures.

According to the Post, the MK-84, nicknamed the “hammer” by US pilots in the first Gulf War, is among the most destructive munitions in Western arsenals, sending metal fragments outward for hundreds of metres and capable of tearing through thick concrete.

“An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile,” conservative commentator Tucker Carlson wrote on X, citing an unnamed federal official. “It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun … The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep.”

The deal has been informally notified to congressional committees.

The Post reported that a senior administration official said only that “all foreign arms sales are moving through the appropriate process,” while the State Department said it does not comment on proposed sales before formal notification to Congress.

Israel has used 907kg bombs hundreds of times in Gaza and Lebanon, including in areas it had designated safe for civilians, drawing sustained criticism from rights groups.

Former US President Joe Biden’s administration paused a single such shipment in 2024 over civilian casualty concerns – the only munition it withheld during the Gaza genocide – before Trump reversed that pause in his first month back in office.

The sale lands amid growing strain between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and rising bipartisan unease in Washington over unconditional military support.

US Senator Chris Van Hollen said he would work to block the sale, accusing Trump of “sending bombs paid for by American taxpayers to a government led by a wanted war criminal”.

Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced on Wednesday he will not clear the planned sale to Israel. In a statement published by the committee on X, Meeks said: “The Trump administration has not provided sufficient assurances that these weapons will be used by the Netanyahu government in accordance with law and with appropriate protections for civilians. I therefore will not clear this sale at this time.”

He added that the decision “does not diminish Congressional support for Israel’s legitimate defense needs”, but “reflects Congress’s responsibility to ensure that US-funded weapons are used lawfully, responsibly, and with meaningful safeguards for human life.”

Meeks’s refusal carries significant weight in the approval process.

Major foreign arms sales are traditionally subject to informal review by the top-ranking member of each party on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who can hold up a deal before it is formally notified to Congress.

As the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s ranking Democrat, Meeks is one of four such lawmakers whose sign-off has customarily been sought, meaning his objection stalls the sale within that informal review, even though it does not amount to a permanent veto.

The administration could still choose to bypass the practice altogether, as it has done with other sales to Israel this year.

Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “We did not vote for this. America does not support this. Our tax dollars and weapons have been used to kill tens of thousands of innocent people.”

Carlson called the roughly $3bn package “a gift” to the Israeli government, which is “working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza”, calling for senators and US lawmakers to block the deal.

Brian Finucane, senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said the sale “sends a vote of confidence to Israel”, even if unintentionally, at a moment when the administration says it wants to calm the region. Analysts see the timing as deliberate on Israel’s part, seeking to lock in expansive US military backing now, wary that a future administration may prove less reliably unconditional.