Shaheen blocks $2.8 billion weapons sale to Israel, joining House counterpart

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has exercised a hold on a $2.8 billion weapons sale to Israel, The Hill has learned, allying with her counterpart in the House and underscoring deep mistrust with the Trump administration and Israeli government.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) has expressed frustration that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done nothing to address concerns from, specifically, Democratic lawmakers over the high civilian death tolls in Gaza, Israel’s bombing in Syria and escalating violence against Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

The weapons package includes 40,000 one-ton bombs, munitions that the former Biden administration held back from sending to Israel for its indiscriminate destruction, contributing to the high-death toll in the Gaza Strip.

An estimated 70,000 Palestinians were killed over the course of the three-year war between Israel and Hamas, according to Palestinian health officials, but that does not distinguish between militants and civilians.

Shaheen, as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations panel, has authority to hold back the Trump administration from moving ahead on weapons sales over a certain dollar amount. It’s generally an informal consultative process, where the State Department works to address a lawmaker’s concerns and get the green light before moving ahead on the arms sale.

Semafor first reported that Shaheen is exercising the hold , and that she put it in place in July. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), her counterpart on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made the rare decision Wednesday to publicly announce he placed a hold on the military sale.

Meeks said he had concerns over whether Netanyahu’s government would use American-provided weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law and U.S. law.

CNN asked Shaheen Wednesday for her reaction to Meeks’s hold, saying, “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,” she said.

“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,” Shaheen continued.