US Secretary of State Antony Blinken fast-tracked the sale of munitions to Israel on Friday, bypassing congressional review over weapons being sent to Jerusalem for its war against Hamas for the second time this month.

The move suggested that growing discomfort in Washington with Israel’s conduct is not yet influencing its near-daily supply of weapons used by the IDF to prosecute the war.

Explaining Blinken’s latest decision to waive congressional review, the Pentagon said that the secretary of state determined that an emergency exists that required the immediate sale of 155 millimeter artillery shells and related equipment to Israel.

The Pentagon said Israel requested that fuzes, primers and charges be included in a previous request for the 155 mm shells. The estimated total value of the sale was $147.5 million.

Blinken used the same emergency authority to fast-track the sale of roughly 14,000 tank shells to Israel on December 9.

But in the weeks between those approvals, Biden officials have intensified their calls for Israel to scale back the IDF’s high-intensity fighting in Gaza amid the Palestinian mounting death toll and international pressure for a ceasefire.

The US and Israel have maintained an understanding whereby Washington continues to provide backing for Israel’s war against Hamas, while Jerusalem takes steps to ensure that humanitarian aid into Gaza can surge in parallel, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel earlier this month.

But aid delivery in the month since a seven-day truce has been limited, with Israel blaming UN and Egyptian authorities for failing to keep up with its pace of inspections, while the UN insists that substantial aid cannot be safely delivered as long as the fighting continues.

Last week, Washington withheld its veto from a UN Security Council resolution calling for increased aid.

Netanyahu used a subsequent phone call with US President Joe Biden to thank Washington for its efforts to successfully alter the text to remove a call for an immediate ceasefire.

For his part, Biden used the call to discuss his desire for Israel to scale back its Gaza offensive, the White House said.

A statement from Netanyahu’s office on the call said the premier “clarified that Israel will continue the war until all of its goals are achieved,” which include toppling the Hamas terror group and bringing home the hostages being held by Palestinian terrorists in the Strip.

Blinken said Wednesday that the US will continue to provide assistance to Israel to “ensure that what happened on October 7 can never happen again.”

Privately, visiting Biden Administration officials have told Israel that they expect the phasing to lower intensity fighting to begin in January, two US and Israeli officials told The Times of Israel.

Biden in mid-December warned that Israel was losing global support due to its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.

Israel’s massive aerial and ground campaign has killed over 21,000 people in Gaza, according to the enclave’s Hamas-run health ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants and includes civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets. The IDF says it has killed some 8,500 terrorists in the war.

The war broke out on October 7 when Hamas terrorists rampaged through southern communities, killing some 1,200 people — mostly civilians massacred in brutal atrocities — and taking around 240 hostages to Gaza.

US frustration with Netanyahu has expanded to other issues, with Biden reportedly telling the premier in that same phone call last weekend that the Israeli cabinet’s decision to withhold tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority must be resolved.

A US official told the Axios news site that the call was one of the most difficult and “frustrating” since the war’s outbreak. “The feeling was that the president is going out on a limb for Bibi [Netanyahu] every day and when Bibi needs to give something back and take some political risk he is unwilling to do it,” the US official said.

According to the Axios report, “Biden asked Netanyahu to accept” the proposal he himself raised several weeks ago: “to transfer the withheld tax revenues to Norway for safekeeping until an arrangement can be found that will assuage Israel’s concerns that the funds could reach Hamas.”

The PA has accepted this arrangement, the report said, but Netanyahu reportedly tried to walk it back and told Biden he no longer thought it was a good idea.

After a few minutes of conversation, Biden told Netanyahu that he expected him to resolve the issue and that he should deal with the hardliners in his coalition on the matter just like he, the president, deals with political pressure from Congress about the war. “The president added that ‘this conversation is over’ and ended the call,” a second US official told Axios.

The US has long pressed Israel to take steps to boost the PA, arguing that the collapse of the more moderate foil to Hamas would result in Israel being responsible for providing services to roughly three million Palestinians in the West Bank.

Washington also views strengthening the PA as a necessary pre-requisite to a two-state solution — a framework opposed by the current Israeli government.