It’s the first arms shipment to Israel to be announced by the administration since it put another arms transfer on hold earlier in the month.

The Biden administration has told key lawmakers it is sending a new package of more than $1 billion in arms and ammunition to Israel, three congressional aides said Tuesday.

It’s the first arms shipment to Israel to be announced by the administration since it put another arms transfer — consisting of 3,500 bombs — on hold this month. The administration has said it paused that earlier transfer to keep Israel from using the bombs in its growing offensive in the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah.

  • MxM111
    -12•7 months ago

    Biden withhold and still withholding bombs. I am actually not sure if it is wise decision in terms of civilian casualties - I am not sure where more civilians will die - with precision bombing and ground attack or just ground attack (supported by tanks and artillery).

    • @distantsoundsEnglish
      21•7 months ago

      It’s the first arms shipment to Israel to be revealed since the administration put another arms transfer, consisting of 3,500 bombs of up to 2,000 pounds each, on hold this month.

      With bombs that size, they want the casualties.

    • FuglyDuckEnglish
      14•7 months ago

      Yes because we really need to give them something…. It’s awfully unfair otherwise…

    • @[email protected]English
      13•7 months ago

      “precision bombing” You toss 2,000 pounds of explosive onto an area. That has a lethal radius of about 380m, or a lethal area of 0.45km². Rafah has 1.5 million people sheltered in an area of 64km² So 23,400 people / km²

      So each of that bomb puts on average 10,500 people at risk of death or serious injury.

      This is not to excuse sending other weapons. Anyone who still sends weapons or any form of military equipment or money to Israel now is willfully complicit in war crimes, massacres and genocide.

      • MxM111
        -5•7 months ago

        It is not 2000 pounds, it is “up to 2000”.

        • @[email protected]English
          6•7 months ago

          So we are only talking 5,000 people at risk with every bomb? Or maybe only 2,000? Well that is a steal!

          • MxM111
            -2•7 months ago

            I understand that lemmy behaves as if Israel is completely reckless and even has as his goal to kill as many civilians as possible. This is not the case if you look at the numbers. If you look here: https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urban-warfare/ then you see that typical ratio of civilians killed in urban conflicts is 90% or 1:9 (military:civilian).

            If you go with 14000 Hamas fighters killed and 35,000 total killed, that means that 21, 000 civilians killed (this number, by the way includes natural deaths and death from Hamas rockets malfunctioning and falling inside Gaza). This is ratio 1:1.4. If you go with Israeli civilian casualties estimations, then the ratio will be close 1:1. But even with Hamas reported numbers, the ratio of civilian deaths is 6 times better than in typical urban warfare. Far from general perception that Israel being reckless.

            It is quite possible that it is partly due to precision bombing and that removing this resource from Israel arsenal will have negative effect on civilian to military death ratio.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•7 months ago

              Israel declares anyone who is male and at least teenage as killed Hamas fighter. There is dozens of videos of clearly unarmed civilians being executed by the IDF. Their numbers of alleged Hamas fighters are highly unreliable.

              • MxM111
                -1•7 months ago

                I have not seen anyone with reputation claiming that. Hamas itself does not object against these claims. And at this point even if they are inflated by factor of two, it would be still good ratios.

                Also, the ratio of civilians killed versus military fighters killed was good for Israel in the past. And nobody objected that either.

                As for clearly civilians being killed - of course they are. But IDF is not Hamas - they do not target civilians on purpose, and as numbers show, they are quite accurate in killing fighters. Are there IDF fuck ups who actually want and kill some civilians? Most likely. In any large scale military such things exist, but they are exceptions which are investigated. IDF is no different than any other military in that respect, including US.

                I understand that echo chamber exist here on fediverse, but the more I study the actual facts more I come to conclusion that the citiation is quite different as most here trying to paint. People react on videos that a) difficult to understand without context b) in terms of statistics are exceptions, not a rule. The overall situation is different and you can’t make conclusions by couple videos.