US foreign affairs committee approves expansion of secretive arms stockpile for Israel

[Deeq A.]

US foreign affairs committee approves expansion of secretive arms stockpile for Israel

The full bill reduces oversight on ‘unlimited’ arms transfers to Israel and also grants Marco Rubio the authority to revoke US citizens’ passports over support of ‘terrorism’

News Desk

SEP 19, 2025

(Photo Credit: Brian Mast)

The US House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) on 19 September voted 27-24 to approve the State Department Reauthorization bill (H.R. 5300), which, among other provisions, permits unlimited transfers of US arms to a special Israel-based stockpile in the next fiscal year.

“This bill is not just a reform for today, it is a lasting framework that will strengthen the State Department and benefit every commander-in-chief who follows,” HFAC Chairman and former Israeli army soldier Brian Mast said following the vote.

Hidden deep within the State Department funding bill is a provision that calls for repealing oversight controls on “defense articles” transferred to the War Reserve Stock for Allies-Israel (WRSA-I) – a US “emergency” stockpile that Tel Aviv has been significantly relying on since the start of its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“[This is] the least transparent mechanism of providing arms to Israel,” former State Department official Josh Paul told Responsible Statecraft earlier this week.

In December 2023, Paul told The Guardian that Washington was dipping into WRSA-I to restock quickly-depleting munitions Israel has kept dropping inside the Gaza Strip.

“We sort of retroactively build a foreign military sales case, which may or may not need to be notified to Congress, depending on what they took and what quantities […] There’s none of the conventional arms transfer policy review that would normally happen […] Essentially, it’s take what you can and we’ll sort it out later,” Paul said at the time.

Created in the 1980s to supply the US military in case of a regional war, the WRSA-I is the largest node in a global network of US weapons caches. Its full contents are not publicly disclosed.

In August, an investigation by the Department of War’s Office of the Inspector General found that “the Army, Navy, and Air Force appointed officials to account for WRSA-I inventory, but those officials did not consistently comply with property accountability requirements.”

“In addition, the DoD OIG found that Service officials did not conduct all required inventories between FY 2022 and FY 2024,” the report highlights.

By 2024, former US president Joe Biden’s administration had temporarily lifted restrictions on the value and type of US weapons transferred to WRSA-I each year. It also bypassed transparency rules by splitting up larger transfers into smaller packages that fell under the $25 million threshold, which would have required notifying Congress.

H.R. 5300 seeks to build atop those provisions to reduce congressional oversight further and allow Israel unrestricted access to the strategic stockpile.

Since October 2023, Israel has acquired a vast amount of US-made weapons from WRSA-I, fueling what experts describe as the most intense bombing campaign of the 21^st century.

HFAC members approved the State Department funding bill just days after an official UN commission of inquiry determined Israel is violating the genocide convention in Gaza.

“The Commission concludes that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the report found.

Qaran News