shelling of Gaza school
August 01, 2014, 11:20 am
Senate passes Iron Dome funding
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) got unanimous consent in the Senate Friday for legislation to give Israel emergency funding for its Iron Dome missile defense system.
“This is a good example of us putting aside partisan considerations,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after passage.
Israel has been battling the terrorist group Hamas for weeks and the conflict continued Friday after Hamas broke the latest cease-fire agreement.
“We are with the Israelis, because if they don’t have the Iron Dome, they can’t defend themselves,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Friday.
The Pentagon requested $225 million to replenish Israel’s missiles used to intercept rocket attacks from Hamas.
Senate passage of that emergency spending measure now sends the bill to the House.
“They’re running out of Iron Dome missiles to protect themselves,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “We are with you. Here are the missiles.”
Jul 30, 2014 4:52pm EDT
U.S. resupplies Israel with munitions as Gaza offensive rages
(Reuters) - The United States has allowed Israel, waging an offensive in the Gaza Strip, to tap a local U.S. arms stockpile in the past week to resupply it with grenades and mortar rounds, a U.S. defense official said on Thursday.
The munitions were located inside Israel as part of a program managed by the U.S. military and called War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I), which stores munitions locally for U.S. use that Israel can also access in emergency situations.
Israel, however, did not cite an emergency when it made its latest request about 10 days ago, the defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The United States allowed Israel to access the strategic stockpile anyway to resupply itself with 40mm grenades and 120mm mortar rounds to deplete older stocks that would eventually need to be refreshed.
"They didn't ask for it from there but we gave it to them so we could rotate our stocks," the official said.
Additional Israeli requests for U.S.-manufactured ammunition were also being processed in the United States, the official said. The official did not offer further details on quantities or costs of ammunition already supplied or requested.
Israel's embassy in Washington declined comment about the resupply request, including whether it asked for the ammunition because of its operations in Gaza.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 1,346 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since Israel began its offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket fire and destroying the tunnel network of the Islamist group Hamas.
