The top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee has thrown up a roadblock to one of the largest US arms transfers of Trump’s second term, refusing to clear a $2.8bn sale of 2,000lb bombs to Israel. Gregory Meeks announced the hold on Tuesday on a package of 40,000 of the bombs, among the most destructive conventional munitions in the US arsenal. Meeks cannot single-handedly veto the $2.8bn arms transfer, but his leverage comes from the informal custom of “tiered review”.
Under this practice, the state department submits major weapons packages to top foreign affairs lawmakers for an informal sign-off before triggering a formal notification to Congress. Killing the sale outright would need a veto-proof joint resolution of disapproval in both chambers, a bar Congress has not cleared. A similar push by Senator Bernie Sanders failed along party lines in April.
In 2025, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared a national security emergency to bypass congressional review and fast-track nearly $3bn in weapons, including more than 35,000 heavy bombs and 4,000 bunker-buster warheads. With a separate $6.67bn package in January, the administration has now cleared or expedited over $12bn in arms for Israel since Trump took office. Meeks has said the pace has outrun oversight, accusing officials of skipping briefings and rushing sales while raising alarms over Israeli conduct in the occupied West Bank and Lebanon.
The hold also lands amid longstanding accusations that Israel has used American weapons unlawfully. The Leahy laws bar US assistance to foreign military units credibly linked to extrajudicial killings and serious abuse; the state department in 2024 flagged at least five Israeli units on those grounds before the war in Gaza even began, including one battalion tied to the death of a Palestinian American at a West Bank checkpoint. The Geneva conventions, meanwhile, bar arming a party where there is a clear risk of war crimes – a standard a UN commission of inquiry cited last year in finding Israel’s Gaza campaign amounted to genocide and calling on the US and other states to halt weapons transfers.
In 2024, Biden administration lawyers, including some at the state department, had concluded it was reasonable to assess that Israel had violated international humanitarian law and Leahy laws by using American weapons in Gaza, even as the administration publicly avoided making that determination. Meeks, long known for his strong pro-Israel views, emphasized that the hold was not a break with the country itself.
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