Aletho News

‘Take what you want and we’ll sort it out later’: US weapons stash fuels Gaza carnage

The Cradle | December 27, 2023

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 back 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.

“Officially, it’s US equipment for US use,” a former senior Pentagon official told The Guardian. “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.

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.”

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.

Although Tel Aviv is not legally allowed to make free use of WRSA-I – the full contents of which are not publicly disclosed – the 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from the stockpile “differ from regular arms sales between the US and another country,” as the munitions can be withdrawn by the Israeli army “before the processes that account for the transferred equipment are fully completed.”

“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.

“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.

Furthermore, in late October, the White House sent a supplemental budget request to Congress that included the removal of restrictions on all categories of weapons and ammunition Israel is allowed to access from WRSA-I.

​“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.

Although there’s little to no transparency about the categories and quantities of weapons the US is providing Israel, in October, Axios reported that Washington would give their allies 155mm artillery shells.

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.

CNN revealed 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.

Israel’s unrestrained use of these munitions inside one of the most densely populated places on earth has quickly turned Gaza into the deadliest military campaign in modern history, with a death rate of no less than 355 civilians per day – roughly 70 percent of whom are women and children.

December 27, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism