Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced a resolution to block a $735 million sale of U.S. precision-guided bombs to Israel, even as Palestinian Hamas terrorists continued to fire barrages of rockets at Israeli civilians on Wednesday.
The $735 million arms deal was arranged before the current war between Israel and Hamas, and includes “Joint Direct Attack Munition variants and Small Diameter Bomb Increment I variants,” according to a Times of Israel report on the resolution.
Both of these munitions are designed to be fired from the air to hit targets on the ground. The Small Diameter Bomb Increment is specifically designed to “decrease collateral damage,” according to a 2006 publication, lowering risks to civilians nearby.
The Biden administration had approved the sale earlier this week, and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), who had considered objecting to it, relented on Tuesday and allowed the deal to proceed without a delay.
But Ocasio-Cortez, who has been hostile to Israel since arriving on the political scene in 2018, will still try to block the sale.
Ocasio-Cortez, joined by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), broke the story with a left-wing Jewish publication, Jewish Currents, which noted that Israel has used both types of munitions in its ongoing battle against Hamas.
In a series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez made several false accusations against Israel, including the claim that it targets civilians.
“The United States should not be rubber-stamping weapons sales to the Israeli government as they deploy our resources to target international media outlets, schools, hospitals, humanitarian missions and civilian sites for bombing,” she tweeted.
Ocasio-Cortez said nothing about the fact that Palesitnian Hamas terrorists target Israeli civilians, and deliberately store and fire rockets in densely populated areas, maximizing the risk to civilians — both of errant rocket launches, and Israeli counter-strikes.
On Wednesday, the Israeli military said that roughly 20% of Hamas rockets fall in Palestinian areas inside Gaza, not Israel.
The Jewish Current suggests that under House rules governing joint resolutions of disapproval, the resolution only has until the end of the day on Thursday, May 20, before it will become moot, given that Congress was notified of the arms sale on May 5.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it). His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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