Shortly after Vice President Joe Biden’s Israel visit ended on March 11 in high dudgeon over the approval 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, US president Barack Obama ordered a consignment of Joint Direct Attack Munition- JDAM already on its way to Israel to be diverted to the US Air Force base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. This step, the pointer to a US arms embargo for preventing Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, is first revealed here by debkafile‘s military sources.
US military sources describe the consignment as consisting of 387 JDAM kits for attachment to the warheads of 2,000-pound BLU-109/MK-84 or the 1,000-pound BLU-110/MK-83 bunker-busters for their conversion into smart bombs.
On March 13, debkafile disclosed that the Obama administration was pondering withholding from Israel military hardware that could be used for an Israeli attack on Iran.  In late February, we reported that defense minister Ehud Barak had submitted to defense secretary Robert Gates a list of the items Israel required urgently to stand up to a four-front assault by Iran and its allies – mainly air force ordnance, certain types of missile and advanced electronic devices. Barak made it clear that all these items must be present in Israel before the outbreak of hostilities. The requests were so urgent that the minister proposed that if Washington was reluctant to hand them directly to Israel, they could be stored for the interim in the big American emergency depots in Israel’s Negev.