The post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, which Trump later said was meant to portray him as a ‌doctor, came amid his escalating feud with Pope Leo, who has criticized the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran as inhumane. Shortly before publishing the image, the president posted a lengthy screed against Pope Leo, calling him “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

Leo, the first U.S.-born pope, said in response to Trump’s attacks that he had “no fear” of the Trump administration and would continue to speak out. In a forceful speech on Monday in Algiers, he denounced “neocolonial” world powers who ​are violating international law, without specifically referring to the United States.

Sunday’s post, depicting Trump in a white robe with an apparently healing hand on a prone man’s head, could create a ​rift between Trump and the religious right, whose support was critical to his victory in the 2024 election.

In the painting-like image, Trump holds a glowing ⁠orb in one hand and uses his other hand to touch a seemingly sick man on the forehead. The Statue of Liberty, fireworks, a fighter jet and eagles could be seen in the background.

Trump ​denied on Monday that the image was intended to show him as a Jesus-like figure, calling that “fake news.”

“It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better, and I do make people better,” ​he told reporters at the White House, soon after the post was deleted.

Brilyn Hollyhand, who served as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council, wrote on X: “This is gross blasphemy. Faith is not a prop. You don’t need to portray yourself as a savior when your record should speak for itself.”

Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer and outspoken critic of transgender athletes in women’s sports who has appeared with Trump at rallies, wrote on X ​she could not understand why Trump posted the image.

“Does he actually think this?” she wrote. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”

Christian ​voters, including Catholics, have formed a critical part of Trump’s political base. Trump, who does not attend church regularly, won large majorities of Christian voters in the 2024 election, including Catholics, who had previously been closer to ‌a split.

After Trump ⁠narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July 2024, some evangelical supporters said it was evidence he had been blessed by God.

‘WATERSHED MOMENT’

David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, a Catholic school, said it was difficult to understand Trump’s motive in attacking Leo and for posting the image, but that it was also hard to say if American Catholics would turn against him.

“Will this move cross a red line for them? Will they finally punish Trump and the GOP and at the ballot box?” he said. “This is a watershed moment – will Catholics in America choose the pope or the ​president?”

Bishop Robert Barron, who serves on a Trump-created ​religious liberty commission, said on X that ⁠the president owed Leo an apology for his “inappropriate” statements on social media. But he also praised Trump in the same post for his outreach to Catholics.

Trump told reporters on Monday he had “nothing to apologize for” to the pope.

In recent weeks, Leo has become one of the most prominent critics of the war in ​Iran, even making an unusual direct appeal to Trump and urging him to find an “off-ramp.”

Leo has also said that Jesus cannot be used to ​justify war and that God ⁠rejects the prayers of those who start conflicts. Those remarks were widely seen as a rebuke to Trump officials like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cited scripture to justify the use of “overwhelming violence” against enemies and likened the rescue of a U.S. airman inside Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Trump also feuded at times with Leo’s predecessor, Francis, who publicly opposed Trump’s deportation campaign as un-Christian. Last year, after Francis’ ⁠death, Trump posted ​an image showing himself as pope, prompting outrage from many Catholics.

But Trump’s attacks on Leo have gone well beyond his swipes ​at Francis.

“American presidents and American Catholics have disagreed with popes in the past,” Gibson said. “But this is disrespect. Disrespect is way different than disagreement, and that’s the danger for Trump here.”

At least eight members of Trump’s cabinet are Catholic, including Vice President ​JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

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In comments aboard the papal flight to Algiers, where the first U.S. pope is starting a 10-day tour to ​four African countries, the pontiff also said the Christian message ​was being “abused”.

“I don’t want to get into a debate with ⁠him,” Leo told Reuters as he greeted journalists on the plane. “I don’t ​think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused ​in the way that some people are doing.”

“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the ​states to look for just solutions to problems,” he said, speaking ​on English.

“Too many people are suffering in the world today,” said Leo. “Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”

“The message of the church, my message, the message of the Gospel: Blessed are the Peacemakers. I do ​not look at ​my role as ⁠being political, a politician,” he said.

Leo, originally from Chicago, has emerged as an outspoken critic of the ​U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in recent weeks and decried ​the “madness of ⁠war” on in a peace appeal on Saturday.

Trump, in an apparent response to the pope’s criticisms of both the conflict and the White House’s ⁠hard-line ​immigration policies, said late on Sunday that ​Leo was “terrible”.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump wrote in ​a post on Truth Social.

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A U.S. official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on trying ‌to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.

But oil prices climbed back over $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.

Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any agreement allowing Tehran to have a ​nuclear weapon.

“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”

Since the United States and Israel began the war on February ​28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.

Trump ⁠has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.

Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defence, warned ​that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.

NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead ​the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.

CEASEFIRE UNDER STRAIN

The ceasefire that halted six weeks of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes looked in jeopardy, with only a week left to run. Washington said Tehran rejected its demands at weekend talks in Islamabad, the highest-level discussions between the two nations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said the blockade would be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations” entering or leaving Iranian ports in the Gulf and Gulf of ​Oman.

“The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz to or from non-Iranian destinations,” Central Command said in a note to seafarers seen by Reuters on Monday.

Two Iranian-linked tankers, the Aurora and New Future, left the ​strait laden with oil products on Monday before the deadline, according to LSEG data.

An Iranian military spokesperson called any U.S. restrictions on international shipping “piracy,” warning that if Iranian ports were threatened, no port in the Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be ‌secure. Any military ⁠vessels approaching the strait would violate the ceasefire, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.

Trump said Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated” during the war, adding that only a small number of “fast-attack ships” remained.

“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea. It is quick and brutal,” Trump, much of whose communications are on social media, wrote on his microblogging site.

He was apparently referring to the U.S. strikes carried out against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes, which began in September, killed more than 160 people. The U.S. military has not provided ​evidence that the vessels were ferrying drugs.

LEBANON FACES ATTACKS

Trump ​has also lashed out at U.S.-born Pope Leo, who ⁠has spoken out against the war, denouncing him as “terrible” in a rare direct attack by a U.S. president on a pontiff.

With the war unpopular at home and rising energy prices causing political blowback, Trump paused the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign last week after threatening to destroy Iran’s “whole civilisation” unless it reopened the strait.

Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon and ​on Monday Israeli troops launched an attack it said was intended to seize a key south Lebanon town from Iran-backed Hezbollah. Israel and the U.S. have said the ​campaign against Hezbollah was not part ⁠of the ceasefire, while Iran has insisted it is.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday it was deeply concerned about attacks on medical workers in Lebanon after a deadly strike on a Red Cross center in the country.

Iran has brought new demands, including recognition of its control of the waterway, lifting of sanctions and the withdrawal of forces from U.S. military bases across the Middle East.

Trump has declared victory, despite failing to achieve the objectives he set out at ⁠the start of ​the war: to eliminate Iran’s ability to strike its neighbours, end its nuclear programme and make it easier for Iranians to topple their ​government.

Benchmark oil prices, which had eased last week after the ceasefire was announced, traded around 6% higher on Monday, off the day’s peaks but still above $100 a barrel.

Traders say the main benchmarks – used to set prices for trillions of dollars’ worth of commodities worldwide – actually understate the severity ​of a disruption with no precedent in modern times.

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With the conflict in its fifth week and Trump under pressure for an off-ramp amid rising gasoline prices, ‌the president scheduled a 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT) speech to discuss the way forward. His address will end a day that began with Trump making a historic visit to the Supreme Court.

Trump, in a phone interview with Reuters, said one element of his speech would be to express his disgust with NATO for what he considers the alliance’s lack of support for U.S. objectives in Iran.

A transatlantic rift in Trump’s second term deepened after European allies rebuffed ​his request to help maintain safe passage for oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

He said he was “absolutely” considering withdrawing the United States from NATO, a treaty organization ratified by ​the U.S. Senate in 1949. Trump has flirted with a withdrawal in the past and has successfully pressured NATO members to increase their defense ⁠spending.

“They haven’t been friends when we needed them,” Trump said. “We’ve never asked them for much … it’s a one-way street.”

Trump and his top officials have offered a variety of timelines for ending ​the war. He said on Tuesday that the U.S. could end its military campaign against Iran within two to three weeks.

In the Reuters interview, he declined to provide a timeline.

“I can’t tell you ​exactly … we’re going to be out pretty quickly,” he said, adding that once a U.S. exit is achieved, “we’ll come back to do spot hits” on Iranian targets as needed.

‘WE GOT REGIME CHANGE’

The war has spread across the Middle East, killing thousands of people and causing soaring energy prices that have fueled global inflation fears.

Two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. should work to end its involvement in the Iran war quickly, even if that means ​not achieving the goals set out by the Trump administration, found a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from Friday to Sunday.

Trump said he hoped for a deal with Iran after the first wave of ​airstrikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A number of other senior Iranian figures have also been killed.

Mojtaba Khamenei has replaced his father as Iran’s supreme leader; the U.S. has said it believes he is wounded and ‌likely disfigured. ⁠The country’s president and foreign minister remain the same as before the conflict.

Trump said Iran’s leadership was now “totally different people.”

“I didn’t need regime change, but we got it because of the casualties of war. We got it. So we have regime change and the big thing we have is they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” said Trump, adding: “Nor do they want one.”

The White House has said behind-the-scenes negotiations are ongoing with Iran, a point that Tehran denies. A source briefed on the matter said Vice President JD Vance was talking to intermediaries from Pakistan about the conflict ​as recently as Tuesday.

At Trump’s direction, Vance signaled ​privately that Trump was open to a ⁠ceasefire as long as certain U.S. demands were met, the source told Reuters on Wednesday.

“We have had full regime change,” Trump said. “I’m dealing with a very good chance that we’ll make a deal because they don’t want to be blasted anymore.”

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Trump has said a primary aim of launching ​the war was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Almost half of Iran’s uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, a short ​step from weapons-grade, was ⁠stored in a tunnel complex at Isfahan and is probably still there, the U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said earlier this month.

The tunnel complex is the only target that appears not to have been badly damaged in attacks last June by Israel and the U.S. on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Trump said the objective of preventing a nuclear weapon has been achieved, however.

Of the enriched uranium, Trump said: “That’s so far ⁠underground, I ​don’t care about that.”

“We’ll always be watching it by satellite,” he added.

He said Iran was “incapable” of developing a weapon ​now.

Iran has long denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon and says its nuclear program is peaceful.

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that when Israel launched its first attacks in June, Iran had 440.9 kg of 60% uranium. If enriched ​further, that would provide the explosive needed for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.

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President Donald Trump gave notice that the U.S. would quit the organization on the first day of his presidency in 2025, via an executive order.

According to a press release from the U.S. Health and State Departments, the U.S. will only work with the WHO in a limited fashion in order to effectuate the withdrawal.

“We have no plans to participate as an observer, and we have no plans of rejoining,” a senior government health official said. The U.S. said it plans to work directly with other countries – rather than through an international organization – on disease surveillance and other public health priorities.

DISPUTE OVER US-OWED FEES

Under U.S. law, it was supposed to give one-year notice and pay all outstanding fees – around $260 million – before departing.

But a U.S. State Department official disputed that the statute contains a condition that any payment needs to be made before withdrawal.

“The American people have paid more than enough,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email earlier on Thursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services said in a document released on Thursday that the government had ended its funding contributions to the agency. Trump had exercised his authority to pause the future transfer of any U.S. government resources to the WHO because the organization had cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, the HHS spokesperson said.

The U.S. flag had been removed from outside the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Thursday, according to witnesses.

In recent weeks, the U.S. has moved to exit a number of other United Nations organizations, and some fear that Trump’s recently launched Board of Peace could undermine the UN as a whole.

Several WHO critics have also proposed setting up a new agency to replace the organization, although a proposal document reviewed by the Trump administration last year instead suggested the U.S. push for reforms and American leadership at WHO.

QUICK RETURN UNLIKELY

Over the last year, many global health experts have urged a rethink, including most recently WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The WHO also said the U.S. has not yet paid the fees it owes for 2024 and 2025. Member states are set to discuss the U.S. departure and how it will be handled at the WHO’s executive board in February, a WHO spokesperson said.

“This is a clear violation of U.S. law,” said Lawrence Gostin, founding director of the O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington, a close observer of the WHO. “But Trump is highly likely to get away with it.”

Bill Gates – chair of the Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health initiatives and some of the WHO’s work – told Reuters at Davos that he did not expect the U.S. to reconsider in the short term.

Gates said he would still advocate for the U.S. to rejoin. “The world needs the World Health Organization,” he said.

WHAT THE DEPARTURE MEANS

The U.S. departure has sparked a financial crisis that has seen the WHO cut its management team in half and scale back work, cutting budgets across the agency. Washington has traditionally been by far the U.N. health agency’s biggest financial backer, contributing around 18% of its overall funding. The WHO will also shed around a quarter of its staff by the middle of this year.

The agency said it has been working with the U.S. and sharing information in the last year. It was unclear how the collaboration will work going forward.

Global health experts said this posed risks for the U.S., the WHO and the world.

“The U.S. withdrawal from WHO could weaken the systems and collaborations the world relies on to detect, prevent, and respond to health threats,” said Kelly Henning, public health program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, a U.S.-based non-profit.

Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge, additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Davos and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Bill Berkrot

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California’s Fast Food Council, comprised of fast-food workers, restaurant owners and state officials, approved a motion Wednesday to consider a cost-of-living-adjustment at an upcoming meeting.

The Council’s next meeting, expected to take place in April or May, will be for further discussion and not see a vote taken on a decision about it.

Before the vote, the Council heard scores of public comments.

Business owners said not enough time has passed since the $20 minimum wage went into effect to study the effects, which they say has already led to higher consumer prices and less jobs for workers.

Workers and labor advocates said the increase was needed to address rising costs of living in one of the country’s most expensive states to live.

Veronica Gonzales, a fast-food worker, spoke remotely from a room full of workers organized under the California Fast Food Workers Union’s San Jose chapter. Through a translator, she said in Spanish that the cost of her rent and her medicine has gone up.

“I cannot live with this wage,” she said.

The possibility of a wage increase, which would be the first for the Council since the state created it last year alongside the $20 fast-food minimum wage, has become a flashpoint in a growing debate about California’s unique effort to regulate the fast-food industry.

California is home to more than half a million fast-food workers, more than any other U.S. state.

California’s law empowers the Council to regulate fast-food restaurants that are part of chains with more than 60 locations nationwide, including wage increases every year of either 3.5% or the increase in the consumer price index, whichever is smaller.

When the California legislature first approved a fast-food-specific minimum wage in 2022, McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger objected to what he called in a letter on its website “lopsided” legislation.

A McDonald’s spokeswoman said that Erlinger’s letter was clear that he “welcomes legislation that increases wages for all workers, as long as it is done thoughtfully and fairly.”

In the letter, Erlinger said the legislation would impose “higher costs on one type of restaurant” — those franchisees that are part of a large national chain– “while sparing another” — independent restaurants and franchisees of smaller chains as well as certain restaurants that bake bread.

Erlinger also said the bill “should raise alarm bells across the country” because it had the potential to influence other states into making similar laws.

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Trump said in a post on Truth Social that his January executive order on digital assets would create a stockpile of currencies including bitcoin , ether , XRP , solana and cardano . The names had not previously been announced.

More than an hour later, Trump added: “And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the Reserve.”

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, was up more than 11% at $94,164 Sunday afternoon. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, was up about 13% at $2,516.

The total cryptocurrency market has risen about 10%, or more than $300 billion, in the hours since Trump’s announcement, according to CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data and analysis company.

XRP is cryptocurrency company Ripple Labs’ token. Ripple backed a so-called super PAC to influence congressional elections in November in favor of the crypto industry, Reuters reported.

“This move signals a shift toward active participation in the crypto economy by the U.S. government,” said Federico Brokate, head of U.S. business at 21Shares, a digital assets investment management firm. “It has the potential to accelerate institutional adoption, provide greater regulatory clarity, and strengthen the U.S.’s leadership in digital asset innovation.”

James Butterfill, head of research at asset manager CoinShares, said he was surprised to see digital assets other than bitcoin included in the reserve.

“Unlike bitcoin…these assets are more akin to tech investments,” Butterfill said. “The announcement suggests a more patriotic stance toward the broader crypto technology space, with little regard for the fundamental qualities of these assets.”

Trump won support from the crypto industry in his 2024 election bid, and he has quickly moved to back their policy priorities. He is hosting the first White House Crypto Summit on Friday, and his family has also launched its own coins.

Under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, regulators cracked down on the industry in a bid to protect Americans from fraud and money laundering.

Under Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission has withdrawn investigations into several crypto companies and dropped a lawsuit against Coinbase (COIN.O), opens new tab, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S.

But in recent weeks cryptocurrency prices are down sharply, with some of the biggest digital currencies erasing nearly all of the gains made after Trump’s election win triggered a wave of excitement across the industry.

Analysts say the market needs a reason to move higher, such as signs that the U.S. Federal Reserve plans to cut interest rates or a clear pro-crypto regulatory framework from the Trump administration.

Reuters has reported that Geoff Kendrick, an analyst at Standard Chartered, is targeting bitcoin to hit $500,000, against a record high of $109,071, before Trump leaves office.

Regulatory filings in the U.S. showed that while hedge funds remain the dominant crypto buyers, banks and sovereign wealth funds are buying too.

Quarterly filings showed that asset managers boosted allocations to U.S. ETFs tied to the price of spot bitcoin in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Analysts and legal experts are divided on whether an act of Congress will be necessary to set up the reserve. Some have argued the reserve could be created via the U.S. Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which can be used to purchase or sell foreign currencies.

Trump’s crypto group had planned to look at potentially creating the stockpile with cryptocurrencies seized in law enforcement actions.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom stressed the importance of trade with Mexico and immigrant labor at a press conference near the border on Thursday, striking a contrast with President-elect Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs and mass deportations.

Newsom, a Democrat, portrayed the Republican president-elect’s planned 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada as a tax on Americans who could see increased prices if the plan moves forward when Trump takes office on Jan. 20.

Trump won a second term last month promising protectionist U.S. trade policies and a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration while also taking aim at transgender rights and diversity initiatives. Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have emerged as prominent Democratic opponents of Trump’s agenda, pledging to defend the state’s liberal policies.

Newsom called the Trump tariff plans “one of the biggest tax increases in U.S. history.”

“Don’t think for a second this won’t impact you,” he said.

Newsom said California was committed to advancing plans to open a new legal border crossing near San Diego, a delayed project known as Otay Mesa East. He said the state would work with outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration but that Trump’s support would be needed to complete it by late 2027.

Newsom said the state’s National Guard troops deployed to the border would search for illicit money and weapons heading to Mexico in addition to ongoing efforts to stop fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.

Agricultural groups have said Trump’s plans for record deportations could decimate the nation’s food supply if it extends to farmworkers, a concern Newsom echoed.

“The impacts of mass deportation on the cost of food in this state, in this nation, are off the charts,” he said.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The new class is the first admitted after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 barred colleges and universities from considering race in admissions resulting from a pair of cases filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

The new Harvard Law data is not broken down by race, meaning it does not reflect possible shifts between different minority groups such as Asian, Black and Hispanic students.

The Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, prompted concern within the legal industry that longstanding efforts to bolster attorney diversity would falter.

Plaintiffs in the cases argued that considering race in admissions was discriminatory against white and Asian American applicants.

This year’s 8-perentage-point decline in students of color at Harvard Law equates to about 45 fewer non-white first-year students out of a class of 560 at the elite law school. At 43%, the proportion of students of color is Harvard’s lowest since 2017. That figure reached a high of 56% in 2021, school data shows.

A Harvard Law spokesperson did not immediately provide comment on the decline Thursday.

Harvard University last week reported that the percentage of Black students in its freshman class dropped by more than a fifth. That class is 14% Black, compared with 18% last year, Harvard said, while the share of Hispanic students ticked up slightly from 14% to 16%.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming freshman class this year dropped to 16% Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students compared with 31% in previous years, which officials attributed to the affirmative action ban.

Half of the law schools ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News & World Report have disclosed some diversity figures, with five saying that their proportion of students of color either held steady or increased over last year.

Along with Harvard Law, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law is the only other top-14 law school to thus far report a year-over-year decline—falling to 50% students of color from 57% last year. A Berkeley Law spokesperson said the California school, which has been under a state-imposed affirmative action ban since 1996, did not change its admissions process and that the makeup of its class fluctuates every year.

The American Bar Association will release detailed, school-specific enrollment data broken down by race in December.

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The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, said the sources, who confirmed a report in the Washington Post.

Washington gives $3.8 billion in annual military assistance to Israel, its longtime ally.

The package comes as Israel faces strong international criticism over its continued bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza and as some members of President Joe Biden’s party call for him to cut U.S. military aid.

The United States has been rushing air defenses and munitions to Israel, but some Democrats and Arab American groups have criticized the Biden administration’s steadfast support of Israel, which they say provides it with a sense of impunity.

Biden on Friday acknowledged “the pain being felt” by many Arab Americans over the war in Gaza and over U.S. support for Israel and its military offensive.

Still, he has vowed continued support for Israel despite an increasingly public rift with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The White House declined comment on the weapons transfers.

The Israeli embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision on weapons follows a visit to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant this week when he discussed Israel’s weapons needs with U.S. counterparts.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Gallant, apparently seeking to cool U.S.-Israeli tensions, said he stressed the importance of U.S. ties to his country’s security and of maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region, including its air capabilities.

The war erupted on Oct. 7 after Hamas militants attacked Israel and killed 1,200 people and seized 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel has retaliated by launching an air and ground assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 32,000 people, health authorities in Gaza say.

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