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<div class="gmail-inner-article-top"><h1 class="gmail-">'Take what you want and we'll sort it out later': US weapons stash fuels Gaza carnage</h1><p class="gmail-">Concerns
are growing over the Pentagon's practice of transferring munitions to
Israel from a secretive US stockpile without congressional oversight or
policy reviews</p><div class="gmail-another-name"><p><a href="https://new.thecradle.co/authors/news-desk-9" style="color:rgb(164,4,4)">News Desk</a></p></div><div class="gmail-another-name" style="margin-top:16px"><p><span>DEC 27, 2023</span></p></div></div><div class="gmail-inner-article-img"><img src="http://thecradle-main.oss-eu-central-1.aliyuncs.com/public/articles/348a163e-a4a3-11ee-bbd1-00163e02c055.webp" alt="" width="440" height="247" style="margin-right: 0px;"><span>(Photo Credit: Anadolu Agency)</span></div><div class="gmail-inner-article-content"><div class="gmail-row"><div class="gmail-col-md-8 gmail-col-sm-7"><div class="gmail-article-content"><span><p>A
stockpile of weapons owned by the US government and hidden inside
Israel – known as the War Reserve Stocks for Allies-Israel (WRSA-I) – is
<a href="https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/1595">back</a> in the
limelight, as former US officials believe the White House has dipped
into it to restock quickly-depleting munitions dropped inside the Gaza
Strip.</p><p>“Officially, it’s US equipment for US use,” a former senior Pentagon official told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/gaza-war-puts-us-extensive-weapons-stockpile-in-israel-under-scrutiny"><i>The Guardian</i></a><i>.</i> “But on the other hand, in an emergency, who’s to say we’re not going to give them the keys to the warehouses?” he added.</p><p>Another
senior US official familiar with WRSA-I told the British news outlet
that, when it comes to air-to-ground munitions, “we’ll give [Israel]
whatever they need.”</p><p>Created in the 1980s to supply the US army in
case of a regional war, the WRSA-I is the largest node in a global
network of US weapons caches.</p><p>Although Tel Aviv is not legally allowed to make free use of WRSA-I – the full contents of which <span style="color:rgb(18,18,18)">are not publicly disclosed – the </span>former
defense officials say transfers from the stockpile “differ from regular
arms sales between the US and another country,” as the munitions can be
withdrawn by the Israeli army “before the processes that account for
the transferred equipment are fully completed.”</p><p>“We sort of
retroactively build a foreign military sales case, which may or may not
need to be notified to Congress, depending on what they took and what
quantities,” said Josh Paul, a former state department official who
resigned in October in protest at Washington’s unbridled support for the
ethnic cleansing of Gaza. </p><p>"There’s no review of human rights,
there’s no review of regional balance, there’s none of the conventional
arms transfer policy review that would normally happen […] Essentially,
it’s take what you can and we’ll sort it out later,” Paul added.</p><p>Furthermore, in late October, the White House sent a supplemental budget request to Congress that included the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/11/25/biden-israel-weapons-stockpile-arms-gaza/">removal of restrictions</a> on all categories of weapons and ammunition Israel is allowed to access from WRSA-I.</p><p>“A
proposal in a legislative request to Congress to waive Congressional
notification entirely for FMF-funded Foreign Military Sales or Direct
Commercial Contracts is unprecedented in my experience […] Frankly,
[it’s] an insult to Congressional oversight prerogatives,” Josh Paul
said about the legal loophole, which was buried after more than 40 pages
of legislative legalese.</p><p>Although there's little to no transparency about the categories and quantities of weapons the US is <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-receives-230-planes-20-ships-loaded-with-us-arms-amid-gaza-war/3092301">providing</a> Israel, in October, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/10/19/us-israel-artillery-shells-ukraine-weapons-gaza"><i>Axios</i></a> reported that Washington would give their allies 155mm artillery shells.</p><p>These
unguided munitions, held in large quantities in WRSA-I, are considered
particularly hazardous as “their accuracy degrades over distance,
increasing the likelihood of civilians and civilian infrastructure
getting hit by errant shells,” according to Marc Garlasco, a former UN
war crimes investigator.</p><p style="margin-left:0px">CNN <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza?cid=ios_app">revealed</a>
earlier this month that a US intelligence assessment determined about
40-45 percent of over 29,000 air-to-ground munitions Israel has used in
Gaza have been unguided.</p><p style="margin-left:0px">Israel's
unrestrained use of these munitions inside one of the most densely
populated places on earth has quickly turned Gaza into the <a href="https://new.thecradle.co/articles/israeli-siege-of-gaza-atop-most-destructive-in-modern-history">deadliest military campaign</a> in modern history, w<span style="color:rgb(25,25,25)">ith a death rate of no less than 355 civilians per day – roughly 70 percent of whom are women and children.</span></p></span></div></div></div></div>
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