US accused of ignoring evidence of civilian harm to continue ‘unconditional weapons transfers’ to Israel, reports say.
The United States identified about 500 reports of Gaza civilians being harmed and killed by Israeli forces with US-supplied weapons but has failed to take action on any of them, according to The Washington Post and the Reuters news agency.
The incidents have been collected since October 7, 2023 by the US Department of State’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons, the Post reported on Wednesday.
Among the cases submitted to the State Department, according to people familiar with the matter, are the January killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in their car, with pieces of a US-made 120mm tank round purportedly found at the scene.
There were shards of US-made small-diameter bombs photographed at a family’s home and at a school sheltering displaced civilians after air attacks in May killed dozens of women and children.
And there was the tail fin of a Boeing-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition on the scene of a July attack that killed dozens of Palestinians.
State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and other sources, including media reports, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.
The mechanism, established in August last year to be applied to all countries that receive US weapons, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.
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 told Reuters, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licences or withholding future approvals.
‘Very difficult work’
The administration of President Joe Biden 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 spokesman 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.
John Ramming Chappell, a legal and policy adviser focused on US security assistance and arms sales at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told the Post that US officials were “ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government”.
“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,” he added.
Mike Casey, who worked on Gaza issues at the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem, told the Post that senior officials routinely gave the impression that their goal in discussing any alleged abuse by Israel was to figure out how to frame it in a less negative light.
“There’s this sense of: ‘How do we make this okay?’” Casey, who resigned in July, was quoted as saying. “There’s not, ‘How do we get to the real truth of what’s going on here?’”
Senior officials, he said, often dismissed the credibility of Palestinian sources, witness accounts, nongovernmental organisations, official accounts from the Palestinian Authority, and even from the United Nations.
William D Hartung, an expert on the arms industry and the US military budget at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the newspaper that “it’s almost impossible” that Israel is not violating US law “given the level of slaughter that’s going on, and the preponderance of US weapons”.
Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, declined to discuss the US inquiries or Washington’s efforts to limit civilian harm with the Post.
The Israeli military says it makes “significant efforts” to avoid civilian harm but has cited the presence of Hamas fighters among civilians as justification to carry out bombings on schools, hospitals, mosques and tent encampments.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health says the majority of the 43,163 people killed since October 7 last year have been women and children.
