With the war in Iran still hot, the U.S. is preparing a major move to shore up one of its key interests in the region: supplying Israel with bombs.
The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is preparing a $2.8 billion sale of bombs to Israel, financed through a government program that would see the U.S. not only release the munitions for sale but pay for them as well, financing Israel’s rearmament with American taxpayer dollars.
Often, traditional arms deals include an agreement to allow a country to purchase U.S. weapons, meaning that at least some of the proceeds make their way into the U.S. economy. But according to the Post, the Trump administration is using a special program called Foreign Military Financing, in which the U.S. would essentially hand Israel the money to buy the weapons from its own coffers.
In 2024, polling found that 52 percent of Americans said that the U.S. government should stop sending weapons to Israel. A New York Times/Siena College poll released late last year also found that a majority of Americans oppose additional economic or military aid to Israel. In June, a Quinnipiac poll found that nearly half of U.S. voters think that America is too supportive of Israel as a whole.
The Post reports that congressional committees have been notified of the planned sale — or rather, gift. Past arms deals under the Trump administration have skirted traditional processes for sale, so it’s unclear if elected officials will have a legitimate window in which to push back on the plan. “All foreign arms sales are moving through the appropriate process. We do not comment on pending sales,” a senior administration official told the Post.
The weapons the U.S. is buying for Israel are devastating. Per the Post, the deal would include 40,000 bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds or more — many of them bunker busters with “penetrator” warheads that create massive craters and send deadly shrapnel hundreds of yards through the air. The majority of the bombs are known as MK-84 or BLU-117s, which are one of the U.S. military’s largest unguided “dumb” bombs, though they can be converted to “smart” targeted munitions. The 2,000-pound MK-84s have enormous destructive power, and Israel has already been criticized for utilizing them in crowded civilian areas throughout its campaign in Gaza and Lebanon. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) claimed that a MK-84 bomb was used to kill Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, and it was the only weapon that Joe Biden prohibited from being sold to Israel during the war in Gaza, a decision that Trump reversed immediately after retaking office.
The U.S. has already expended an enormous amount of material in its war with Iran, and has also drained key strategic resources of missiles and interceptor rockets on Israel’s behalf during that country’s long campaign in Gaza. While the MK-84s are not a specialized munition like the interceptors and long-range missiles the U.S. has been using heavily in Iran, it is a brutally destructive weapon that can be used to horrific effect on populated areas.
Israel, it seems, won’t be running out of firepower anytime soon.
