Responding to Republican questions about the reports on the matter during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the 2025 Defense budget, Austin reiterated that the United States' commitment to Israel's defense is "ironclad" and that the paused shipment of weapons was for re-evaluation.
"We're going to continue to do what is necessary to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself, but that said, we are currently reviewing some near-term security assistance shipments in the context of unfolding events in Rafah," he said, adding that they have not made a decision on the matter.
The hearing was held days after it was reported that a shipment of bombs, including 2,000-pound bombs, had been halted, seemingly in an effort to pressure Israel to reconsider its looming invasion of Rafah, a southern Gazan city were some 1.4 million Palestinians are estimated to be refuging, which is more than half of the enclave's population.
Since the start of the war on Oct. 7 with Hamas' bloody surprise attack on Israel, the United States has been fully supportive of its Middle Eastern ally, sending it billions of dollars in military assistance.
As the war has continued, devastating the Palestinian enclave and ballooning a death toll into the tens of thousands, the Biden administration has increased its call on Israel to do more to protect Gazan citizens.
Israel for months now has argued it needs to enter Rafah to ferret out the remaining Hamas warriors hiding in the city, as the destruction of the Iran-backed militia is one of its tenets of victory in the war.
However, the United States, along with other nations and the United Nations, has now openly voiced opposition to the ground campaign, warning that it could equal a humanitarian catastrophe.
On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the widely expected assault to be "a strategic mistake, a political calamity and a humanitarian nightmare."
Austin explained that the United States has been clear to Israel in its demands that it should not launch a major attack on Rafah without accounting for the civilians in the theater.
"As we have assessed the situation, we paused one shipment of high-payload munitions and, again, I think we've also been very clear about the steps we'd like Israel to take to account for those civilians before major combat takes place," he said. "We certainly would like to see no major combat take place in Rafah, but certainly our focus is on making sure we protect the civilians."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., lambasted the decision, accusing the Biden administration of instructing Israel how to fight an existential war and that by withholding the weapons, they were sending the wrong message to adversaries.
"If we stop weapons necessary to destroy the enemies of the state of Israel at a time of great peril, we will pay a price. This is obscene. This is absurd. Give Israel what they need to fight the war they cannot afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids," he said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat for Connecticut, was the next to speak, defending the move by stating that the United States has learned from its own previous failed strategies the limitations of fighting terrorism with war.
He asked the secretary what lessons learned from the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be applied to Israel, to which Austin responded that a key lesson was that the protection of civilians was not only a moral imperative but a military one to prevent future terrorism.
"You have to protect the people, the civilians in the battle space, otherwise you create more terrorists going forward," he said. "So, it is not only a moral imperative, but it is also a strategic imperative that you protect civilians, and the two are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. And we know how to do that."
He continued that the weapons paused are not those from the recently Congressionally approved supplemental act that includes lethal assistance for allies, including Israel.
The pause is also to do with the types of weapons included in the shipment, he added, stating for dense city warfare like Rafah, precision munitions are probably better than a 2,000-pound bomb.
Those, he said, "could create a lot of collateral damage."
"We've been very clear that ... Israel needs to do more to protect the civilians in the battle space and we wanted to make sure that we saw a plan to move those civilians out of the battle space before executing any kind of ground combat operation," he said. "And we would also like to see them do more precise operations."
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