Jake Johnson
Common Dreams / October 30, 2024
One expert said the Biden administration is “ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the Netanyahu government.”
The Biden administration has reportedly received around 500 notices from international humanitarian groups, nonprofit organizations, and eyewitnesses alleging that the Israeli military has used American weaponry in attacks that harmed civilians in the Gaza Strip, likely in violation of both U.S. and international law.
But the administration, which has armed Israel’s military to the hilt since the Hamas-led attack of last year, “has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims,” according to The Washington Post, which first reported the nearly 500 notices on Wednesday.
Dozens of the reports delivered to the U.S. State Department over the past year “include photo documentation of U.S.-made bomb fragments at sites where scores of children were killed,” the Post noted, citing unnamed human rights advocates who were briefed on the process.
“Yet despite the State Department’s internal Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, which directs officials to complete an investigation and recommend action within two months of launching an inquiry, no single case has reached the ‘action’ stage,” the newspaper reported, citing unnamed current and former officials. “More than two-thirds of cases remain unresolved… with many pending response from the Israeli government, which the State Department consults to verify each case’s circumstances.”
“When it comes to the Biden administration’s arms policies, everything looks good on paper but has turned out meaningless in practice when it comes to Israel.”
John Ramming Chappell, a legal and policy adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told the Post that Biden administration officials are “ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the Netanyahu government.”
“When it comes to the Biden administration’s arms policies,” Chappell added, “everything looks good on paper but has turned out meaningless in practice when it comes to Israel.”
William Hartung, a senior research fellow and arms industry expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Post that “it’s almost impossible” that Israel isn’t violating U.S. law “given the level of slaughter that’s going on, and the preponderance of U.S. weapons.”
Since last October, the U.S. has delivered more than 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel, a flow of arms that has continued amid overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military has used American weapons to commit grave violations of international law.
In April, as Common Dreams reported at the time, Amnesty International USA sent a research brief to the Biden administration detailing several cases in which the Israeli military violated international humanitarian law with U.S. weapons, including a pair of deadly strikes last year on homes full of civilians—attacks that killed 19 children.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military bombed a five-story residential building in northern Gaza, killing around two dozen children and scores of adults.
Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, told reporters Tuesday that the Biden administration is “deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life in this incident” and has “reached out to the government of Israel to ask what has happened here.”
Later in the same briefing, reporters pressed Miller on actions the Biden administration is taking to push Israel to stop impeding shipments of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. It’s been just over two weeks since the Biden administration sent a letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off U.S. military assistance if the humanitarian situation in Gaza doesn’t improve within 30 days.
“Obviously, the 30 days isn’t up,” Drop Site’s Ryan Grim noted during Tuesday’s press briefing. “But two weeks ago the situation in northern Gaza was bad; like, today it’s utterly dystopian. The opposite of making progress has happened there.”
Miller responded that “we have made clear that the situation in northern Gaza… needs to change.”
Nevertheless, Miller insisted to reporters that the U.S. State Department has “not assessed [Israel] to be in violation of the law at this point,” a statement that contradicts the findings of both internal department experts and outside analysts.
“All the laws and policies that are supposed to prevent U.S. weapons from being used to commit atrocities by foreign countries are being completely ignored by the Biden admin in its rush to continue unimpeded weapons flows to Israel to commit genocide,” Josh Ruebner, policy director at the IMEU Policy Project, wrote Wednesday.
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams
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US identified 500 cases where its weapons harmed Gaza civilians but hasn’t taken action
Reuters / October 30, 2024
Some the incidents might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources.
US state department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, according to three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter.
The incidents – some of which may have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources – have been recorded since 7 October 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the state department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance (CHIRG), a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.
State department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.
The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment and coordinated department action.
None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licenses or withholding future approvals.
The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.
The Biden administration has said it is reasonable to assess that Israel has breached international law in the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was “very difficult work”, state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.
“We are conducting those investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it’s important that we not jump to a pre-ordained result, and that we not skip any of the work,” Miller said, adding that Washington consistently raises concerns over civilian harm with Israel.
The Biden administration has long said it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.
John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said the Biden administration “has consistently deferred to Israeli authorities and declined to do its own investigations”.
“The US government hasn’t done nearly enough to investigate how the Israeli military uses weapons made in the United States and paid for by US taxpayers,” he said.
Another US official told Reuters that the US embassy in Jerusalem has raised a number of incidents with Israel under the guidance.
The process does not only look at potential violations of international law but at any incident in which civilians are killed or injured and in which US arms are implicated, and looks at whether this could have been avoided or reduced, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A review of an incident can lead to a recommendation that a unit needs more training or different equipment, as well as more severe consequences, the official said.
Israel’s military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave’s health authorities.
The latest episode of bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on 7 October 2023, when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others, according to Israeli tallies.
