Leaked List of Weapons the U.S. Secretly Sent Israel

List includes thousands of Hellfire missiles, which Israel is using in its Gaza operation

The Biden administration has tried hard to conceal the nature and quantity of the weapons it’s provided Israel for its war on Hamas, as I’ve reported for The Intercept. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must now report that an internal Defense Department list of the weapons has leaked (reproduced below).

• 2,000 Hellfire missiles for Apache attack helicopters. The Lockheed Martin precision-guided Hellfires are being used more and more extensively by Israel now that its ground operations in Gaza dominate the war.

• 30mm chain gun ammunition, also for Apache attack helicopters. General Dynamics manufactures the latest ammunition.  

• 57,000 155mm shells for artillery guns

• 400 120mm mortars 

• PVS-14 Night Optical Devices 

• M141 shoulder-fired bunker-busters, officially “bunker defeat munitions,” the Western equivalent of Hamas RPGs and designed to engage targets at short range. “Bunker buster” as described in the news media is a bit misleading as the munition is used at 250 meter range to attack above-ground fortifications.

• 75 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, manufactured by Oshkosh Defense.

• 300+ Tamir interceptors, used for Israel’s “Iron Dome” system, and manufactured by Raytheon (RTX) in cooperation with Israel.

It would be a crying shame if you posted to social media this list of weapons, which again, the Biden administration has gone to great lengths to hide from the public. 

The administration has repeatedly rebuffed attempts by the press to ascertain the nature of the weapons U.S. tax dollars are paying to provide to Israel. Here’s a representative example from a Pentagon press briefing last month.

Q: Yes, can you give us a ballpark? Hundreds, thousands of these munitions?

SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I'm not going to do that today and would defer you to the government of Israel.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby rather bluntly summarized the administration’s position in a press briefing last month. Kirby said that U.S. arms assistance to Israel is taking place “on a near-daily basis,” but “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course.”

Of course.

Except it isn’t true. Basic transparency about the nature and quantity of arms assistance is no threat to operational security, as arms expert William Hartung of the Quincy Institute told me.

By comparison, the Biden administration publicizes a 3-page long fact sheet detailing all sorts of weapons it has provided to Ukraine, as well as quantities.

The “operational security” argument sounds like malarkey.