News - World: The Axios website reveals that the US provided Israel with over 70,000 weapons aircraft, ground vehicles, missiles and bombs between 1950 and 2022.

The US has provided Israel with at least 16 types of weapons in 2023, including missiles and aircraft, though the exact number and types of weapons have not been made public.

According to Axios website, Joint Direction Action Munitions (JDAMs) are the most common weapon system the US has supplied to Israel over the years.

Boeing last month sped up the deliveries of 1,800 JDAM kits to Israel from a 2021 sale that was originally to be fulfilled over several years.

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military financing, with most of that aid coming in the form of weapons grants. 

"I think it's a safe assumption to say that U.S. weapons are being used extensively in the current Israeli operations in Gaza," Elias Yousif, US arms transfer expert at the Stimson Center, told Time earlier this month.

The Pentagon has stated  it will not put limits on how the Israel Defense Forces uses US provided weaponry, though the Biden administration has called on Israel to limit civilian casualties and has endorsed humanitarian pauses in the fighting.

For its part, the Intercept has exposed the presence of a covert US military facility located on a mountain named Har Qeren in the Negev desert, situated in southern Israel. It is reported that the United States is discreetly expanding this base.

According to a report authored by Klein Kleibenstein and Daniel Bogoslav, US government documents reveal the construction of the base, offering unique insights into the existence of a US military installation in proximity to the Gaza Strip. (Mt. Har Qeren is approximately 32 kilometers away from the Gaza border).

The report indicated that though US President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send US troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret US military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing. 

The Intercept pointed out that two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build US troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding US base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel. 

It added that this base serves as a radar facility focused on monitoring the skies for potential missile threats, primarily from Iran, rather than addressing the immediate threat from Gaza, situated only 30 kilometers away.

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