Trump Administration Notifies Congress of $2.8 Billion, 40,000-Bomb Sale to Israel

The Trump administration is preparing to sell Israel a $2.8bn package of 907kg (2,000-pound) bombs, according to reporting by The Washington Post and AFP. The deal has been informally notified to congressional committees, the standard first step before a formal foreign military sale.

The package, funded through Foreign Military Financing, a program in which Washington gives Israel money that Israel then spends buying American weapons, includes 40,000 munitions: 20,000 MK-84 general-purpose bombs and 20,000 BLU-117s, a thermally coated variant built for safer storage aboard naval vessels. It also includes I-2000 Penetrator warheads designed to strike hardened underground structures. The Post describes it as the largest single sale of the munition in recent years.

The MK-84, nicknamed the "hammer" by US pilots during the first Gulf War, is among the most destructive conventional bombs in the American arsenal, scattering fragments hundreds of meters and capable of penetrating thick concrete. Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, citing an unnamed federal official, wrote on X that the bomb has "a destruction radius of half a mile" and "releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun," adding that it "collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep." That characterization is attributed to an unnamed source and has not been independently verified.

A senior administration official told the Post only that "all foreign arms sales are moving through the appropriate process." The State Department said it does not comment on proposed sales before formal notification to Congress.

Israel has used 907kg bombs hundreds of times in Gaza and Lebanon, including in areas it had designated safe for civilians, drawing sustained criticism from human rights groups. In 2024, the Biden administration paused a single shipment of the munition over civilian casualty concerns, the only weapon it withheld during the war in Gaza. Trump reversed that pause within his first month back in office.

"Sending bombs paid for by American taxpayers to a government led by a wanted war criminal."

That is how Senator Chris Van Hollen described the sale, saying he would work to block it. Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that "we did not vote for this" and that "our tax dollars and weapons have been used to kill tens of thousands of innocent people." Carlson called the roughly $3bn package "a gift" to a government he said is "working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza," urging lawmakers to block it.

Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group said the sale "sends a vote of confidence to Israel," even if unintentionally, at a moment when the administration says it wants to calm the region. Analysts cited by Al Jazeera see the timing as deliberate on Israel's part, an effort to lock in expansive US backing now against the possibility that a future administration proves less reliably unconditional.

The sale surfaces amid strained relations between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and growing bipartisan unease in Washington over unconditional military support for Israel.