The State Department announced on Friday that it was planning to send Israel more than $6.5 billion of weapons aid that included Apache attack helicopters and combat land vehicles, bypassing a congressional review process.
The packages of four weapons systems had been under review for months by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The State Department is supposed to wait for approval from the top two members on each of those committees before announcing the aid. But in this case, the department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio circumvented that norm.
It was the third time that the Trump administration has bypassed this part of the congressional process, called informal review, to send weapons to Israel.
Each of the four items is called a case. The largest of the cases is Apache attack helicopters, valued at $3.8 billion. A case of Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, or JLTV, a newer version of Humvees, is valued at $1.98 billion. The other cases are AW119 Koala light helicopters and power packs for armored personnel carriers.
The State Department sent the cases to the two committees in Congress for informal review sometime in early fall, a congressional aide said.
Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had not approved any of the weapons sales and had sent requests to the State Department that had not been answered, the aide added.
“Just one hour before doing so, the Trump administration informed me it would disregard congressional oversight and years of standing practice and immediately notify over $6 billion in arms sales,” Mr. Meeks said in a written statement on Friday night. “This is yet another repudiation by Donald Trump of Congress’s constitutional oversight role.”
The State Department declined to comment on exchanges with Congress.
The United States provides more than $3.8 billion in annual weapons aid to Israel, according to an agreement between the two nations. Congress approves the funding, and the Defense and State Departments work with the Israeli government to decide which weapons the United States should send Israel.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, the U.S. government has given Israel billions of dollars in additional arms aid each year that goes well beyond the standard congressional appropriation.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to retaliate against the Hamas attacks in 2023 has made arms aid to the Israel Defense Forces an especially contentious issue in the United States. While Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, in its attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number.
In the United States, critics of Israel’s actions have called for a halt to arms shipments to Israel. They have accused the Biden and Trump administrations of taking part in a genocide, though U.S. officials have maintained that Israel has the right to defend itself and will continue to receive American weapons.
Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement last October, but Israel has continued to carry out attacks that kill Palestinians in Gaza and demolish buildings.
Some Democratic lawmakers have called for a suspension of weapons aid to Israel to give U.S. officials some leverage over the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who often ignores requests from the White House and the State Department.
Last March, Mr. Rubio invoked “emergency authorities” to bypass congressional review to send $4 billion in weapons aid to Israel. That came about a month after the State Department announced it was sending $8 billion in weapons aid to Israel, circumventing the informal review process in Congress. The Biden administration had put together the $8 billion package and then sent it to Congress for review.
On Friday, the State Department also announced it was sending $9 billion of interceptor missiles to Saudi Arabia for use with U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems. Saudi Arabia is by the far the biggest buyer of U.S. weapons.
Some Democratic lawmakers have been reluctant to endorse weapons sales to Saudi Arabia because of the country’s record of human rights abuses and its mass killings of civilians with American-made bombs in its recent yearslong war in Yemen.
The State Department made separate announcements of the planned shipments of arms to Israel and Saudi Arabia after 5 p.m. on Friday, a sign that it did not want to draw attention to the statements. In each case, the State Department said it was formally notifying Congress of its plans.
In the case of the missiles for Saudi Arabia, the congressional committees had approved those during informal review, the congressional aide said.
President Trump has threatened to attack Iran soon, and the U.S. government has been trying to quickly send more air defense equipment to partners in the Middle East, to better protect those nations and U.S. military sites in the countries against possible retaliation by Iran.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
The post Trump Officials Bypass Congress to Push Billions in Weapons Aid to Israel appeared first on New York Times.
