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12-05-2024
WASHINGTON: The Biden administration believes that Israel has most likely violated international standards in failing to protect civilians in Gaza but has not found specific instances that would justify the withholding of military aid, the State Department told Congress on Friday.
In the administration’s most detailed assessment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the State Department said in a written report that Israel “has the knowledge, experience and tools to implement best practices for mitigating civilian harm in its military operations” but it added that “the results on the ground, including high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial questions” as to whether the Israel Defense Forces are making sufficient use of those tools.
Even so, the report which seemed at odds with itself in places, said the US had no hard proof of Israeli violations. It noted the difficulty of collecting reliable information from Gaza, Hamas’s tactic of operating in civilian areas, and the fact that “Israel has not shared complete information to verify” whether US weapons have been used in specific incidents alleged to have involved human rights law violations.
The report, mandated by President Biden, also makes a distinction between the general possibility that Israel has violated the law and any conclusions about specific incidents that would prove it. It deems that assurances Israel provided in March that it would use US arms consistent with international law are “credible and reliable,” and thus allow the continued flow of US military aid.
The conclusions are unrelated to Biden’s recent decision to delay the delivery to Israel of 3,500 bombs and his review of other weapons shipments. The president has said those actions were in response to Israel’s stated plans to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
The report said its findings were hampered in part by the challenges of collecting reliable information from the war zone and the way Hamas operates in densely populated areas. It also stressed that Israel has begun pursuing possible accountability for suspected violations of the law, a key component in the US assessment about whether to provide military aid to allies accused of human rights violations.
Israel has opened criminal investigations into the conduct of its military in Gaza, the report said, and the Israel Defense Forces “are examining hundreds of incidents” that may involve wartime misconduct.
The report also did not find that Israel had intentionally obstructed humanitarian aid into Gaza.
While it concluded that both “action and inaction by Israel” had slowed the flow of aid into Gaza, which is desperately short of necessities like food and medicine, it said that “we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” into the territory. Such a finding would have triggered a US law barring military aid to countries that block such assistance.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer now with International Crisis Group, said the report “bends over backwards” to avoid concluding that Israel violated any laws, a finding that would place major new pressure on Biden to restrict arms to the country.
Finucane, a critic of Israel’s military operations, said that the report was “more forthcoming” than he had expected, but that he still found it “watered down” and heavily “lawyered.” The findings further angered a vocal minority of Democrats in Congress who have grown increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They argue that Israel has indiscriminately killed civilians with American arms and intentionally hindered US-supplied humanitarian aid. (Int’l News Desk)
