From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Agreeing with Gallant, US says progress made in smoothing arms transfer process
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
The US agrees with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that progress has been made in transferring weapons to Israel, confirming that there had been some bottlenecks that are now being addressed.
A senior Biden administration official briefing reporters indicates that the bottlenecks weren’t intentional and that Gallant’s meetings with top officials in Washington were an opportunity for the US to speed up certain shipments while reprioritizing others based on Israel’s needs.
The comments from the senior administration official are the closest the US has come to recognizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public complaints about the issue, which has sparked a bitter dispute between the governments. Washington has repeatedly denied withholding weapons shipments from Israel beyond one transfer of heavy bombs that US President Joe Biden fears the IDF would use in the densely populated Palestinian city of Rafah.
Gallant criticized Netanyahu earlier today for publicly airing his grievances on the matter, rather than settling the issue privately. After meeting US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, the defense minister announced that he had made significant progress in addressing bottlenecks in weapons transfers.
“What he was referring to is very accurate in terms of how the discussion went,” the senior administration official tells reporters. “It’s fair to say there are bottlenecks in the system. It’s a very complex system and for good reason.”
“There are some things we are able to maybe pull up a little faster or reprioritize,” the senior US official adds. “The progress that was made was the ability to sit down with the people who do this work every day and go through every single case and where it is in the system.”
“Where there were some misunderstandings, those were clarified,” he adds.
Speaking about the one shipment of high-payload bombs, the senior administration official says that the sides have agreed to have their national security experts consult on the issue, while clarifying that Biden’s concerns about how they might be used by the IDF are “valid.”
