The senior Democrat on the United States Senate foreign relations committee, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, has objected to and blocked a 2.8 billion dollar arms sale to Israel. The United States news outlet The Hill has learned of the matter. Her counterpart in the United States House of Representatives has taken the same position. The move makes still clearer the depth of distrust of the Trump administration and the Israeli government.
The Democratic senator for New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, complains that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has taken no step to address the concerns, particularly of Democratic lawmakers, about the large number of civilian deaths in Gaza. She has also expressed concern about Israel’s bombing in Syria and the growing violence of extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
The proposed arms shipment includes 40,000 one-tonne bombs. The administration of the former United States president Joe Biden had withheld those bombs from Israel over fears of widespread destruction in Gaza. The use of weapons of this kind has also been discussed as a factor in the heavy loss of life in the Gaza Strip.
By the count of Palestinian health officials, an estimated 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the three-year war between Israel and Hamas. That count does not separate out how many of the dead were fighters and how many civilians.
As the senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, Shaheen has the power to block the Trump administration’s decisions on arms sales above a certain value. This is generally an informal advisory process, in which the state department tries to resolve the lawmaker’s concerns and to obtain their consent before going ahead with a sale.
Semafor first reported that Shaheen had blocked the sale, and that she took the step in July. Shaheen’s counterpart on the House foreign affairs committee, Representative Gregory Meeks, took the rare step on Wednesday of stating publicly that he too had blocked the military sale. Meeks said he had concerns about whether the Netanyahu government would use weapons supplied by the United States in accordance with international humanitarian law and United States law.
The United States news channel CNN asked Shaheen on Wednesday for her reaction to Meeks’s step. Shaheen replied: “We are all concerned about what Israel is doing.” She said: “We are concerned about what they are doing in Gaza, about the bombing they are carrying out in places like Syria, and about what that means in the Middle East — particularly what it means for the prospects of any peaceful solution.”
Shaheen added: “Netanyahu has to hear from America that we do not like what he is doing. We also do not like what is happening in the West Bank. Palestinians are being killed there in settler violence, they are being driven from their homes and basic infrastructure is being disrupted. And the Netanyahu administration has essentially taken no step to solve these problems.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report