WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The U.S. State Department approved $7.41 billion in military exports to the occupying regime of Israel, the Pentagon announced on Friday.
According to the State Department, two separate sales were sent to Congress on Friday. One is for $6.75 billion in an array of munitions, guidance kits and other related equipment.
It includes 166 small-diameter bombs, 2,800 500-pound bombs, and thousands of guidance kits, fuses and other bomb components and support equipment. Those deliveries would begin this year.
The other arms package is for 3,000 Hellfire missiles and related equipment for an estimated cost of $660 million.
The announcement came amid Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. where he met with President Donald Trump to discuss bilateral ties and the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip.
Last month, Trump announced that he lifted a hold imposed by the former Biden administration on supplying bombs to Israel.
Last May, then-president Joe Biden paused the delivery of a weapons shipment that included 2,000-pound bombs that Israel had used to flatten wide swathes of Gaza.
Biden made the decision due to concerns over the possible use of the bombs in a heavily populated area.
Nevertheless, the U.S. under Biden provided Israel with $17.9 billion in military aid from October 2023, where the occupying regime launched its war on Gaza, to October 2024 alone. The figure was around six times the volume of Washington’s routine annual military aid to the regime.