Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh officially announced yesterday that the USS Wasp Amphibious Ready Group would be deploying into the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. She claimed that the three-ship task force and the 2,000 Marines it is carrying, would not be going there to be available for an evacuation of Americans from Lebanon, should full-scale war break out between Hezbollah and Israel, however. Rather, she insisted that the ships were going there to “deter” such a war. “They are there in the region to ensure regional stability, to deter aggression,” Singh said.
While the U.S. will purportedly be trying to “deter” an Israel-Hezbollah war, it has already supplied the bombs necessary for Israel to fight such a war. Reuters, in a report posted late yesterday, shows that the whole story about the slowdown of U.S. weapons shipments to Israel is a sham. Two U.S. officials told Reuters that the U.S. has sent to Israel large numbers of munitions, including more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles, since the start of the war in Gaza.
Between the war’s start last October and recent days, the United States has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision- guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions, according to the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly. While the officials didn’t give a timeline for the shipments, the totals suggest there has been no significant drop-off in U.S. military support for its ally, despite international calls to limit weapons supplies and a recent administration decision to pause a shipment of powerful bombs.
