The Senate is set to hold another round of votes on blocking U.S. arms transfers to Israel, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) filed three new joint resolutions of disapproval against $658.8 million in sales of 500- and 1,000-pound bombs to Israel and “defense articles” for 250-pound bombs.

“Given the horrific destruction that Israel’s extremist government has wrought on Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, the last thing in the world that American taxpayers need to do right now is to provide 22,000 new bombs to the Netanyahu government,” Sanders said. “No more weapons to support an illegal war.”

The effort is being co-sponsored by Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Peter Welch (D-VT).

Sanders emphasized that the administration had sidestepped normal congressional review procedures using emergency authorities in advancing the arms sales earlier this month.

Sanders and other progressive Democrats have forced votes on similar efforts to block arms sales to Israel on three previous occasions since the war in Gaza began, with a majority of the Democratic caucus — 27 lawmakers — voting to block at least one arms sale in July of last year, a significant jump in support from similar efforts in November 2024 and April 2025.

Israel’s standing among Democrats has worsened since last July, with even some Democrats who supported continued arms sales at that time blaming Israel for dragging the U.S. into the war in Iran. Polls show registered voters now see Israel more negatively than positively.

Some senators have argued the U.S. should have threatened to cut off military support to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran.

Van Hollen, Merkley and Welch, in statements, all framed the bomb sales as proxy votes on the war in Iran, and a vote to block the sales as a step toward ending the war. Senate Democrats have voted nearly unanimously as recently as yesterday to bring an immediate end to the war in Iran.

“With the bombs already provided to Israel by American taxpayers, Israeli forces are unleashing a campaign of total war in Iran with the clear and deliberate intention to eviscerate Iran’s economy and society,” Welch said in a statement. “I support these joint resolutions to make sure that we do not send another 20,000 bombs to Israel that will result in further destruction in Iran and Lebanon. We must end this war, and we must not send these bombs.”

On the other hand, some Democrats who had voted in favor of previous arms sales flipped in the July 2025 vote to express frustration with the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

With the war in Gaza now in a ceasefire, humanitarian aid restored and efforts toward reconstruction slowly starting, that motivation for blocking arms sales may no longer be salient for some Democrats.

The arrest on Monday of a Palestinian student at Columbia University who helped organize campus anti-Israel demonstrations was the latest front in the Trump administration’s closely scrutinized crackdown on foreign activists who have expressed sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. 

Mohsen Mahdawi, a 34-year-old green card holder born and raised in the West Bank, was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers on Monday after he appeared at a U.S. citizenship interview in Vermont, where he resides.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in an email to Jewish Insider on Tuesday that Mahdawi “was a ringleader in the Columbia protests,” sharing a New York Post article citing anonymous State Department sources claiming that he had used “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students.

“Due to privacy and other considerations, and visa confidentiality, we generally will not comment on Department actions with respect to specific cases,” a State Department spokesperson told JI on Tuesday.

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday calling his detention unlawful. “This case concerns the government’s retaliatory and targeted detention and attempted removal of Mr. Mahdawi for his constitutionally protected speech,” the petition said.    

Representatives for Columbia declined to comment on Mahdawi’s arrest, citing federal student privacy law.

Like Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and recent Columbia University graduate arrested by federal immigration agents last month, Mahdawi has not yet been charged with a crime. Instead, he appears to have been detained on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act cited by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to justify expelling foreigners who are seen as a threat to U.S. foreign policy and national security, which the petition also challenges.

Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered that Khalil can be deported, determining such arguments are sufficient grounds for his removal, in a decision that is expected to face further challenges.

A federal judge in Vermont ruled on Monday that Mahdawi must be held in the state and cannot be removed from the country for now. 

Mahdawi’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.    

Mahdawi had been a key organizer of anti-Israel protests at Columbia that roiled the campus after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. He helped to found Columbia University Apartheid Divest and was a member of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which has expressed pro-Hamas rhetoric, among other student anti-Israel groups. 

For his part, Mahdawi, who moved to the U.S. from a refugee camp in the West Bank in 2014, called Hamas a “product of the Israeli occupation” shortly after the attacks and reportedly helped to write a statement released by Columbia student groups on Oct. 14, 2023, claiming that the “Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”

He also appeared at a rally a month after the attack alongside Nerdeen Kiswani of Within Our Lifetime, a radical group that advocates for armed resistance against Israel. 

In an interview on “60 Minutes” in December 2023, Mahdawi voiced sympathy for Hamas’ terror attacks.

“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done. I said I can empathize,” he said. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward.”

On his Instagram page in August, meanwhile, Mahdawi posted photos commemorating what he called the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, a field commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah, describing him as a “fierce resistance fighter,” according to The Washington Free Beacon. 

“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote.

While the petition filed by his legal team notes that he stepped back from such activism in March 2024, Mahdawi’s public statements drew intense scrutiny from several antisemitism watchdog groups that are pushing the Trump administration to target campus protest leaders.

Mahdawi, who was an undergraduate at Columbia University, was planning to pursue a master’s degree in the fall, according to the petition.

His arrest drew criticism on Monday from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), who said in a statement that “he must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”