U.S. inundated with claims that American arms killed Gaza civilians
The State Department has received hundreds of reports that Israel’s use of U.S. weapons is responsible for excessive casualties. It has yet to take action, officials say.
Washington Post
October 30, 2024
By Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum
The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, according to people familiar with the matter.
At least some of these cases presented to the State Department over the past year probably amount to violations of U.S. and international law, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
The reports are received from across the U.S. government, international aid organizations, nonprofits, media reports and other eyewitnesses. Dozens include photo documentation of U.S.-made bomb fragments at sites where scores of children were killed, according to human rights advocates 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, current and former officials told The Washington Post. More than two-thirds of cases remain unresolved, they said, with many pending response from the Israeli government, which the State Department consults to verify each case’s circumstances.
Critics of the Biden administration’s consistent provision of arms to Israel, now 13 months into a war that has killed 43,000 people, according to Gaza’s health authorities, say the handling of these reports is another illustration of the administration’s unwillingness to hold its close ally accountable for the conflict’s staggering toll.
“They’re ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the Netanyahu government,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal and policy adviser focused on U.S. security assistance and arms sales at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “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.”
The State Department declined to detail the volume of incidents under investigation.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under guidelines set by the administration, said the government closely tracks the incidents referred to the State Department and questions the Israeli government about them. Even when cases aren’t resolved, the official said, the investigations help to inform policy.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike on an apartment building killed more than 90 people, including 25 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that the United States was “deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life” and that Washington was seeking a “full explanation.” The Israeli military said it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed.”
Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, declined to discuss the U.S. inquiries or Washington’s efforts to limit civilian harm. “As part of the close alliance between Israel and the United States, there is continuous and close contact with the American administration regarding Israel’s struggle against terrorist attacks against its citizens,” Marmorstein said in a statement.
The Israeli military says it makes “significant efforts” to avoid civilian harm but has cited the presence of Hamas fighters hiding among civilians as justification to carry out bombings on schools, hospitals, mosques and tent encampments. Gaza’s Health Ministry says the majority of the dead have been women and children.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to the Israeli government threatening vague policy “implications” if Israel did not immediately allow more aid into Gaza, where doctors and analysts say thousands have starved to death. The warning was widely interpreted to mean Washington may consider withholding arms transfers unless the humanitarian situation markedly improves.
In their letter, Blinken and Austin also acknowledged the failure of U.S. efforts to mitigate Israel’s civilian causalities. “It is vitally important that our governments establish a new channel through which we can raise and discuss civilian harm incidents. Our engagements to date have not produced the necessary outcomes,” they wrote. They gave Israel 30 days to deliver results, which would delay any action until after next week’s U.S. presidential election.
The State Department’s civilian harm guidance, unveiled by the Biden administration in August 2023 in response to congressional concerns about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ bombardment of Yemen, instructs the agency in how to assess whether a foreign military has violated any one of an assortment of U.S. laws and make clear recommendations for action.
By investigating such cases, officials should be able to “identify, recommend, and document what actions the Department can and will take in response to such incidents,” according to the 21-page policy document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post but has not been made public.
Current and former U.S. officials described a process that, while detailed and deliberate on paper, has become functionally irrelevant with more-senior leaders at the State Department broadly dismissive of non-Israeli sources and unwilling to sign off on action plans.
Some U.S. officials and congressional Democrats have been frustrated by the State Department’s apparent tendency to rely on Israel to substantiate the allegations against it.
Mike Casey, who worked on Gaza issues at the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem, said 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?’” said Casey, who resigned in July. “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, eyewitness accounts, nongovernmental organizations, official accounts from the Palestinian Authority, and even from the United Nations.
The U.S. official who addressed questions about the administration’s handling of these reports said that the State Department considers both Palestinian and Israeli voices as it assesses allegations of civilian harm.
People familiar with the process said that at least one-quarter of cases have been dismissed in the first of three investigative stages, either because they are deemed not credible or because there was no indication of U.S. weapons use. The majority have proceeded to the “verification” stage, whereby, “We ask the [government of Israel] about the cases: Did you forewarn? Why did you hit this school or safe road or safe zone?” said one former official.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who has met with administration officials on several occasions to discuss the issue, said he has been deeply frustrated by what he called a lack of follow-through. “There’s no set timeline for getting responses to the many ad hoc inquiries that have been made,” Van Hollen said.
The Biden administration is intensely focused on “making sure that the norms of international humanitarian law are upheld,” Blinken said in Qatar last week.
“Everything that we’re focused on involves making sure, to the best of our ability, that those norms are upheld, and that we’re maximizing the ability both to protect people and to make sure that they’re getting the help that they need,” Blinken said.
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military aid since World War II, and the Biden administration has provided it with at least $17.9 billion in U.S. military assistance in the past year alone, according to a recent study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
But despite deepening alarm among administration officials and lawmakers over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, nearly all military assistance, apart from a delayed shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, has continued to flow without interruption. The pace and volume of weaponry has meant that U.S. munitions make up a substantial portion of Israel’s arsenal, with an American-made fleet of warplanes to deliver the heaviest bombs to their targets, analysts say.
William D. Hartung, a co-author of the Watson Institute report and an expert on the arms industry and the U.S. military budget at the Quincy Institute, said “it’s almost impossible” that Israel is not violating U.S. law “given the level of slaughter that’s going on, and the preponderance of U.S. weapons.”
Among the cases submitted to the State Department, according to people familiar with the matter, are the January killing of a 6-year-old girl and her family in their car, with pieces of a U.S.-made 120mm tank round purportedly found at the scene. There were shards of American-made small diameter bombs photographed at a family’s home and at a school sheltering displaced civilians after airstrikes 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 airstrike that killed at least 90 Palestinians.
“The U.S. is the biggest donor to Israel with these weapons,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “And it’s a year in. When is the United States going to put its foot down?”