The Reason U.S. Arms Shipments to Israel Have Slowed

American arms shipments to Israel have slowed since the early months of the war in Gaza because many of the previously ordered weapons have already been shipped or delivered while the Israeli government has put in fewer new requests, U.S. officials said.

Allegations of slowed arms shipments have roiled relations between Israel and the White House over the past week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the current delivery pace a trickle, a claim the Biden administration has contested.

Both U.S. and Israeli officials agree that there has been a change since March, roughly around the same time the U.S. finished fulfilling existing orders.

The current delivery pace is only a slowdown compared with the massive airlift of tens of thousands of weapons in the initial months after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, a State Department official said, and is currently similar to or even higher than peacetime levels.

“Our pace is normal, if not accelerated, but slow relative to the first few months of the war,” said a State Department official.

State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said on Monday that Israel may have requested fewer weapons recently. An Israeli defense ministry spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Netanyahu told his cabinet earlier this week that Israel had seen “a dramatic halt” to arms shipments about four months ago, just as the military was going into the southern Gaza city of Rafah. “I didn’t do it lightly,” he said of his decision to go public in a bid to break the logjam.

The Biden administration has said there has been no change in the overall policy of arming Israel.

“We have made our position clear on this repeatedly and we are not going to keep responding to the Prime Minister’s political statements,” a White House official said in a statement.

Netanyahu’s comments came as his rival Defense Minister Yoav Gallant traveled to Washington this week. Gallant met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA director William Burns on Monday, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday. He is scheduled to meet with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Wednesday.

U.S. officials said weapons sales were among the topics they expected Gallant to raise during his visit.

Tracking weapons deliveries to Israel is complex, since weapons orders are often made years in advance, and the U.S. government doesn’t announce shipments.

Many of the U.S.-provided weapons are being sent to Israel without any public disclosure, often drawing on previously approved arms sales, U.S. military stockpiles and other means that don’t require the government to notify Congress or the public. That approach has made it difficult to assess how much and what kind of weaponry the U.S. is still sending.

Biden has faced pressure from progressives in his party who have called for cutting off weapons deliveries amid the high pace of civilian deaths in Gaza. More than 37,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian health authorities. The figures don’t say how many combatants have been killed.

The lack of transparency around weapons sales to Israel has helped Biden, said Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in October in protest of the administration’s handling of the Gaza war.

“What they don’t have to deal with is a daily drumbeat about what was delivered,” he said. “They don’t want to be talking about arms transfers.”

Major U.S. foreign military sales go through a congressional notification process. The initial surge of armaments after the war in Gaza started involved 600 cases of potential military sales worth more than $23 billion between the U.S. and Israel, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Earlier this year, the U.S. neared the completion of the existing orders, requiring the administration to approach Congress about new weapons orders, the State Department official said.

Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, said that at the beginning of the war in Gaza, the Biden administration fast-tracked around two years’ worth of munitions shipments to Israel within two months. The shipments then slowed down, he said, but not necessarily due to political reasons.

“Netanyahu said something correct on the one hand, but on the other gives this dramatic interpretation that has no basis,” Eiland said.

While Israeli operations in Gaza have slowed, and thus require fewer weapons, its military is gearing up for a potential conflict on its northern border. Last week, the Israeli military approved an operation against Hezbollah, something the Biden administration has cautioned against.

The Israeli military holds stockpiles of weapons in reserve in the event of a possible war with Lebanon, according to current and former Israeli officials. Israeli military officials said that because the slowdown happened without explanation, it had become a factor for possible future operations in Lebanon.

Since May, the State Department has delayed moving forward with a sale to Israel of new F-15 jet fighters, precision weapons and $1 billion deal for mortar rounds, military vehicles and tank ammunition, U.S. officials said. In May, the Biden administration announced that it had suspended the delivery of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs to Israel over concerns about civilian casualties.

The dispute over weapons began this past week when Netanyahu in an English-language video accused the Biden administration of depriving Israel of weapons. He repeated his claims in an interview with Israeli television that aired on Sunday and again before his cabinet.

The spat has high stakes for both sides as Netanyahu is expected to address Congress on July 24 at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.). The Israeli leader could also soon face an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes from the International Criminal Court.

Some Israeli political analysts said Netanyahu’s comments appeared to be an attempt to gain political advantage within Israel, where he faces questions about his handling of the war and an escalating clash with Israel’s military leadership over operations in Gaza.

“I think Netanyahu is doing this for his own political purposes,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. “He wants to be able to run against Biden it seems.”

Dov Lieber contributed to this article.

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at [email protected] and Jared Malsin at [email protected]