A US-made precision-guided bomb that targets specific targets and ideally limits civilian casualties has been used in airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians, including women and children.
The weapon, the GBU-39, or small diameter bomb, was used in an attack on a former United Nations school on Thursday and in a May 26 attack in Rafah. In both cases, the Israeli military defended its actions, saying the attacks were directed against militants using civilians as human shields. According to the health authorities in Gaza, civilians were also killed, and videos and images of women and children could be seen among the dead.
Two weapons experts told The New York Times that Israel appears to have increased its use of the bombs since the beginning of this year, compared with the early days of the war, when it used them in just 10 percent of airstrikes against Gaza. As a recent spate of Israeli attacks shows, even a relatively small bomb can cause heavy civilian casualties.
“Even using a smaller weapon or a precision-guided weapon doesn’t mean you’re not killing civilians, and it doesn’t mean all of your attacks are suddenly lawful,” said Brian Castner, a weapons expert at Amnesty International.
Early in the war, the Israeli military carried out full-scale invasions of Gaza towns using tanks, artillery and 2,000-pound bombs, earning international condemnation for the high number of civilian casualties.
At the Biden administration’s urging, Israel has shifted its combat strategy to low-intensity operations and targeted attacks and is now relying more heavily on the GBU-39, analysts said. The bomb weighs 250 pounds, including 37 pounds of explosives, and is fired from fighter jets.
Ryan Brobst, a military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the shift appears to begin in January or February and “likely explains the change in munitions used.”
Last month, an unexploded GBU-39 was found at a school in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, and the distinctive rear tailfin of the same type of bomb appeared at the site of a May 13 attack further south on a family home at a school in Nuseirat, killing up to 30 people people were killed.
And GBU-39 remains appeared outside homes hit by deadly Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in April, at an undisclosed location in Gaza in March and in Tal-Al Sultan in January, analysts said.
These examples of Israel’s use of the GBU-39 represent only a fraction of what experts estimate has been a total of at least tens of thousands of airstrikes using a variety of weapons. But wreckage found after airstrikes and calls to replenish Israel’s stockpile signal that Israel has clearly increased its use of the GBU-39, several analysts said.
“We’ve seen a lot more GBU-39 scrap in the last few months,” Mr. Castner said. “The trend is from larger to smaller.” (However, Amnesty investigators continue to see evidence of large-scale munitions such as the Mark 80 series, which weighs up to 2,000 pounds, and were fired into densely populated areas early in the war.)
Only the Israeli military has an accurate tally of how often and where it has used GBU-39s since the war began in October, after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, Israel says. Israeli military officials did not respond to questions about the weapon in Gaza, but said in a written statement to The New York Times on Thursday that “the IDF prefers to use lighter ammunition when the nature of the target and operational conditions permit.”
The statement continued: “The ammunition selected by the IDF is chosen to match the ammunition type of the specific target, with the intention of achieving the military objective while taking into account the environment and mitigating damage to the target . “To protect the civilian population as much as possible.”
During the first six weeks of the war, Israel routinely dropped 2,000-pound bombs in southern Gaza, where civilians had been ordered to relocate for their safety. The strikes have turned homes into giant craters and killed thousands of people, a Times investigation found in December.
In November, U.S. officials called on Israel to use smaller bombs to better protect civilians. Just a month earlier, the GBU-39’s maker, Boeing Corp., accelerated delivery of 1,000 of the weapons from an unfinished 2021 order.
In December, President Biden warned Israel that it was losing global support in the war because of “the indiscriminate bombings that are taking place.”
“We have made it clear to the Israelis, and they recognize, that the security of innocent Palestinians is still of great importance,” Mr. Biden said on December 12. “And so the actions they take must be consistent in trying to do everything possible to prevent innocent Palestinian civilians from being injured, murdered, killed and lost.”
But the smaller bombs also caused collateral damage.
The first known use of GBU-39 in the current war was on October 24 in Khan Younis, where two family homes were hit by four of the bombs, an expert said.
In January, Israel bombed the top two floors of a five-story residential building in Rafah just before 11 p.m. 18 civilians were killed, including four women and ten children. This comes from an investigation by Amnesty International, which concluded that the bomb used in the attack was a GBU-39. It was among examples compiled by Amnesty International in April of the potentially unlawful use of American weapons in Israel, dating back to January 2023.
The State Department concluded in May that Israel had most likely violated humanitarian standards by failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but said it had found no specific cases that would justify withholding American military aid.
Current and former U.S. officials said Israel generally does not share information about its use of GBU-39 with Washington, and a State Department system set up in August to track civilian deaths from U.S.-made weapons in conflicts abroad is having difficulty to create a comprehensive list. A US official said the May 26 airstrike in Rafah would be investigated as part of the new process to determine whether the use of American weapons violated humanitarian laws.
Israel has used the GBU-39 since 2008 and has deployed it in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. The bombs have a range of at least 40 miles and are guided by GPS, with coordinates for specific targets set before the weapons are fired. Experts say the GBU-39 is so precise that it can hit specific rooms in buildings.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms transfers, the United States has delivered at least 9,550 GBU-39s to Israel since 2012, including the 1,000 shipped last fall under the expedited order. Mr. Brobst, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said more have likely been shipped since then.
Most attack aircraft can carry eight GBU-39s simultaneously and each can be independently piloted to different targets. That makes it an efficient weapon for the Israeli army, said NR Jenzen-Jones, director of the Defense Research Services.
However, in terms of limiting civilian casualties, “it is not a panacea,” said Jenzen-Jones. “It may be small compared to other aerial bombs, but the small diameter bomb still packs a significant punch.”
Myra Noveck reported from Jerusalem and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
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2024-06-08 09:28:41
www.nytimes.com
