WASHINGTON — President Trump has ended his predecessor’s hold on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, lifting a pressure point that had been meant to reduce civilian casualties during the U.S. ally’s war with the Hamas militant group in Gaza that is now halted by a tenuous cease-fire.
In a post on his Truth Social network Saturday, Trump said, “A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are now on their way!”
A Trump administration official confirmed that he was referring to the heavy bombs. The official was not authorized to give that detail publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Then-President Biden halted the delivery of the large bombs in May as part of an effort to keep Israel from launching an all-out assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah. A month later, Israel did take control of the city, but after the vast majority of the 1 million civilians that had been living or sheltering there had fled.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN in May when he held up the weapons. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem.”
The Biden pause had also held up 1,700 500-pound bombs that had been packaged in the same shipment to Israel, but weeks later those bombs were delivered.
Trump’s action, five days into his term, comes as he has celebrated the first phase of a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel that has paused the fighting and seen the release of some hostages held by the militants in the Gaza Strip in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Negotiations have yet to begin in earnest on the more difficult second phase of the deal negotiated under Biden that would eventually see the release of all hostages held by Hamas and an enduring halt to the fighting.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 250 others hostage. More than 100 were freed in a weeklong truce the following month. Israel believes at least a third of the more than 90 captives still in Gaza are dead.
Israel’s air and ground war has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not differentiate between combatants and civilians but say women and children make up more than half the fatalities. The war has leveled wide swaths of Gaza, displaced the vast majority of its population and left hundreds of thousands of people at risk of famine.
Miller writes for the Associated Press. Times staff contributed to this report.