Trump ends hold on delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel
Shipment was withheld by Biden administration due to its concerns over potential use in densely populated areas of Gaza

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel.
“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details.
Also Saturday, Trump said to reporters aboard Air Force One, “We released them (the bombs). We released them today. And they’ll have them. They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them for a long time. They’ve been in storage.”
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday thanked Trump for lifting the hold, writing on X, “Thank you President Trump for yet another display of leadership by releasing the crucial defense shipment to Israel. The region is safer when Israel has what it needs to defend itself.”
While the president didn’t provide further details, his post could suggest that there were more weapons shipments delayed beyond the 2,000-pound bombs, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed. The Biden administration adamantly asserted, however, that only the 2,000-pound bombs were withheld, over concerns that Israel would use them in densely populated parts of Gaza, and that all other shipments were processed.
The US rushed billions of dollars in military aid to Israel throughout the past 15 months of war in Gaza, sparked by the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, assault in southern Israel. But the Biden administration acknowledged that it stopped fast-tracking weapons to Israel later on in the war, and instead required each transfer to go through the usual approval process, as is the case for other countries, including Ukraine.
The matter of weapons shipments has been a source of contention at several points throughout the war.
In June, Netanyahu posted a video on social media berating the Biden administration for supposed holdups in the supply of arms to Israel.
“It’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel,” the premier said at the time. “Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.”
The White House rejected Netanyahu’s account of weapons holdup, with then-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying, “We genuinely do not know what [Netanyahu] is talking about. We just don’t.”
Several weeks later, however, a senior Biden administration official confirmed that there had been some unintentional “bottlenecks” in weapons transfers that were being addressed.

In October, Washington warned Jerusalem in a letter that it had a month to significantly alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by the war, or risk the US withholding weapons shipments. But the threat never materialized, and the Biden administration acknowledged in November that Israel had taken some — but not all — of the steps demanded of it. The steps the Biden administration had been pushing for included enabling the entry of at least 350 aid trucks into Gaza each day, implementing “adequate” humanitarian pauses in fighting and clarifying that there was no government policy to forcibly evacuate civilians from northern Gaza.
When Trump won the presidential election in November, it significantly slashed the Biden administration’s leverage over Israel, leading Jerusalem to assume that the next president would reverse any decision to withhold weapons shipments upon his return to office.
Trump’s decision to reverse the hold on the 2,000-pound bombs comes after the State Department on Friday froze new funding for almost all US foreign assistance, but made an exception to allow military aid to Israel and Egypt to continue.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.