A pro-Israel Congress member has put a hold on bombs to Israel

Gregory Meeks at a rally on the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington in August. (Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock)

Killing the sale outright would require a veto-proof joint resolution of disapproval in both chambers, a bar Congress has not cleared in the past. Tucker Carlson says public outrage is necessary (2 Articles)

(1/2) Key House Democrat refuses to clear Trump’s $2.8bn arms sale to Israel

By Joseph Gideon, reposted from The Guardian, September 16, 2026

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.

“The Trump administration has not provided sufficient assurances that these weapons will be used by the Netanyahu government in accordance with US law and with appropriate protections for civilians,” he said. “I therefore will not clear this sale at this time.”

The deal, funded through US Foreign Military Financing, covers 20,000 MK-84 bombs, 20,000 BLU-117 bombs and 20,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads.

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.

“This decision does not diminish congressional support for Israel’s legitimate defense needs,” he said. “It reflects Congress’s responsibility to ensure that US-funded weapons are used lawfully, responsibly and with meaningful safeguards for human life.”

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Joseph Gedeon is a politics breaking news reporter based in Washington.

(2/2) Only Public Outrage Can Stop This: A Tucker Carlson Commentary

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively, they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

*EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to Rep. Gregory Meeks’ efforts, US Sen. Chris Van Hollen also vowed Wednesday to block the $2.8 billion arms transfer to Israel, criticizing the provision of heavy munitions amid persistent bombardments across the Gaza Strip, and calling Netanyahu a “war criminal”*

Read this commentary on Tucker’s X here.

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