Trump clears Israel weapons package worth $2.8 billion, including controversial bombs

The Trump administration has informally notified Congress of a $2.8 billion arms package for Israel, one of the largest single transfers of heavy air-to-ground munitions in recent years. The order comprises 40,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, split evenly between MK-84 general-purpose bombs and BLU-117s, alongside 20,000 I-2000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads designed to punch through soil, rock and reinforced concrete before detonating on delay. Most of the sum is structured through Foreign Military Financing, the mechanism by which American taxpayer money is handed to Israel as aid and then spent back into US defence contractors.

The notification comes at a time when a fragile US-brokered Gaza ceasefire holds, unevenly, amid continuing skirmishes and retaliatory strikes, and coincides with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's scheduled appearance at the UN General Assembly in New York. It also completes a reversal that has been building since January 2025. In mid-2024 the Biden administration froze a single MK-84 shipment, the bomb nicknamed "the Hammer," over fears of mass civilian death in crowded Palestinian neighbourhoods. Trump lifted that hold on returning to office, and this package follows two earlier ones under his watch: a $2.7-3 billion deal in early 2025 that bypassed standard congressional review, and a $6.67 billion package cleared in January.

Diplomatically, the sale is a vote of confidence delivered at a moment when Israel faces mounting international isolation over its military campaigns. It also confirms something the friction between Trump and Netanyahu has periodically obscured: whatever irritation the president has expressed over how operations in Gaza, Lebanon and the joint US-Israel war against Iran launched in February have been prosecuted, the pipeline of heavy strike weapons has never actually closed.

Operationally, the appeal of 2,000 pound munitions is straightforward. The I-2000 and MK-84 variants are built to reach deep tunnel networks and subterranean structures used by militant groups in Gaza and Lebanon, and ordnance specialists note that a single MK-84 carries enough blast energy to bring down a multi-storey building. That same power is the source of the sale's controversy. A 2,000 pound bomb detonating in an urban setting produces a lethal blast wave extending beyond 1,000 feet and a crater some 50 feet deep, and human rights organisations argue that deploying weapons of that scale in dense neighbourhoods causes heavy civilian loss even when the intended target is a single individual. In Gaza, humanitarian groups warn that more heavy bombs will only deepen the devastation already inflicted on urban areas.

The State Department has briefed the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees informally about the deal. While congressional Democrats broadly object on human rights grounds, Secretary of State Marco Rubio retains emergency authority to bypass formal approval altogether. However, overturning such a declaration would need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to survive a presidential veto, a bar Congress is unlikely to clear. Opposition is not confined to the left. Conservative voices, Tucker Carlson among them, have criticised the package on the grounds that flooding Israel with heavy ordnance prolongs the confrontation with Iran and draws Washington deeper into a conflict it should be extracting itself from. And the sale arrives against a backdrop of strain on America's own arsenal. The Congressional Budget Office puts the cost of the Iran war to US taxpayers at $38 billion already, rising by roughly $3 billion a month, and defence analysts estimate that replenishing depleted precision-weapon stockpiles could take up to five years, a timeline that leaves Washington thinner than it would like heading into any other crisis that might demand the same munitions.