Last week, Trump’s West Asia envoy, Steve Witkoff, acknowledged that Washington has approved the transfer to Israel of GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs (MOAB), also known as the “Mother of All Bombs.”
At 11 tons, they are the heaviest and most destructive bombs in the US’ non-nuclear arsenal. Their extensive blast radius extends deep underground, where they can penetrate and demolish reinforced subterranean infrastructures, from bunkers to civilian air-raid shelters. Indeed, precisely because of the range of the MOAB’s indiscriminate lethal power, the Pentagon has indicated that it can be used as an antipersonnel weapon.
Israel has been thirsting after this weapon for the past quarter of a century, but previous US administrations (including Trump’s first) had refused to greenlight the MOAB for Israel out of concern for the mass destruction it could cause and fear of ratcheting up tensions and instability in the Middle East.
So far, the quantity of MOABs Trump has approved for the Israeli occupying power remains unknown. But we must wonder how Netanyahu might use them. He might have wanted them to destroy entire apartment blocks in Gaza on the pretext that a Hamas operative was hiding inside it or below it. But surely, he no longer needs them now that he has levelled more than 90 per cent of Gaza’s above- and below-ground civilian infrastructure, using US-made “dumb bombs” and “bunker busters”. So where does he plan to use the MOABs?
One does not need to answer this question to understand that the mere presence of these weapons in the Israeli arsenal poses a threat to all countries in the region.
Trump talks about rebuilding Gaza to turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and bringing peace and prosperity to the war-torn enclave that hasn’t seen stability in a hundred years, as he put it. But here is a question: how does one reconcile such talk with his decision to equip a trigger-happy country which totally demolished the Strip with a massively lethal weapon which previous administrations had withheld with good reason?
The answers to those questions are more nightmarish than the questions themselves. Perhaps more disturbing is how this news item passed unnoticed.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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