Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has exercised a hold on a $2.8 billion weapons sale to Israel.
Shaheen is joining Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), her counterpart on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who publicly announced his own hold on the military sale Wednesday.
The weapons package at the center of the dispute includes 40,000 one-ton bombs, munitions that the former Biden administration had withheld from Israel over concerns about indiscriminate destruction.
The Biden administration’s earlier decision to hold back those munitions was directly linked to the high civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip during the conflict.
An estimated 70,000 Palestinians were killed over the course of the three-year war between Israel and Hamas, according to Palestinian health officials, though that figure does not distinguish between militants and civilians.
Shaheen has expressed deep frustration that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken no steps to address concerns raised specifically by Democratic lawmakers regarding civilian deaths in Gaza.
Her concerns also extend to Israel’s bombing campaign in Syria and escalating violence against Palestinians carried out by extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
As the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations panel, Shaheen holds the authority to block the Trump administration from moving forward on weapons sales above a certain dollar threshold.
The hold process is generally informal, with the State Department typically working to address a lawmaker’s concerns and obtain approval before proceeding with an arms sale.
Semafor first reported that Shaheen placed the hold in July, though the senator’s stance became more publicly prominent following Meeks’s announcement this week.
Meeks said he placed his hold due to concerns over whether Netanyahu’s government would use American-provided weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law.
When CNN asked Shaheen for her reaction to Meeks’s hold, she said, “all of us share concern about what Israel is doing.”
“What they’re doing in Gaza, they’re bombing in places like Syria and what that means for any peaceful solution in the Middle East,” Shaheen told CNN, elaborating on the breadth of her concerns.
“Netanyahu needs to hear from America that we don’t like what he’s doing. We don’t like what’s happening in the West Bank where settler violence is killing Palestinians, sending them out of their homes, disrupting basic infrastructure. And the Netanyahu administration has basically done nothing to address that,” she continued.
The coordinated resistance from the top Democrats on both chambers’ foreign affairs committees signals a significant and growing rift between congressional Democrats and both the Trump administration and the Israeli government over the conduct of the Gaza war.
