The Biden administration believes Israel most likely violated international standards by failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but has found no specific cases that would justify withholding military aid, the State Department told Congress on Friday.
In the government’s most detailed assessment of Israel’s behavior in Gaza, the State Department said in a written report that Israel “has the knowledge, experience and tools to implement best practices to reduce civilian harm in its military operations.”
However, it added that “the findings on the ground, including the high number of civilian casualties, raise significant questions” about whether the Israel Defense Forces is making sufficient use of these tools.
Still, the report — which at times appeared to contradict itself — said the United States had no clear evidence of Israeli violations. It pointed to the difficulty of gathering reliable information from Gaza, Hamas’s tactics of operating in civilian areas and the fact that “Israel has not shared complete information to verify” whether US weapons were present in certain areas incidents allegedly involving human rights violations.
The report, commissioned by President Biden, also distinguishes between the general possibility that Israel has violated the law and any conclusions about specific incidents that would prove it. She considers Israel’s assurances in March that it would use US weapons in accordance with international law to be “credible and reliable” and thus enable the continued flow of American military aid.
The conclusions are unrelated to Mr. Biden’s recent decision to delay the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel and his review of other weapons shipments. The president said these actions were in response to Israel’s stated plans to invade the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
The report said its findings were affected in part by challenges in gathering reliable intelligence from the war zone and the way Hamas operates in densely populated areas. It also emphasized that Israel has begun pursuing possible responsibility for alleged violations of the law, a key part of the U.S. assessment of whether to provide military aid to allies accused of human rights abuses.
Israel has launched a criminal investigation into the conduct of its military in Gaza, the report said, and the Israel Defense Forces are “investigating hundreds of incidents” that may represent misconduct during the war.
The report also did not find that Israel had intentionally obstructed humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
While it concluded that both “action and inaction by Israel” had slowed the flow of aid to Gaza, which is lacking essential supplies such as food and medicine, it also said: “We do not currently believe that Israel will Government prohibits or imposes other restrictions on the transportation or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance into the territory.
Such a finding would have led to a U.S. law banning military aid to countries that block such aid.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who now works at the International Crisis Group, said the report “avoids anything” to avoid concluding that Israel violated laws, a finding that again struck Mr. Biden strongly would put pressure on them to restrict arms deliveries to the country.
Mr. Finucane, a critic of Israeli military operations, said the report was “more powerful” than expected, but he still found it “watered down” and heavily “legalistic.”
The results also angered a vocal minority of Democrats in Congress who have become increasingly critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza. They argue that Israel has indiscriminately killed civilians with American weapons and intentionally obstructed humanitarian aid provided by the United States.
Both would violate US laws regulating arms sales to foreign forces and international humanitarian law, which is largely based on the Geneva Conventions.
The report did not define the significance of its other criteria for Israel’s actions, “established best practices for mitigating civilian harm,” but cited Defense Department guidelines on the subject released last year that include some measures “not required under the laws of war.” “. .”
“If this behavior meets international standards, then God help us all,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, told reporters after the report was released. “They don’t want to have to do anything to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for what happened,” he added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Critics of Mr. Biden’s continued broad military support for Israel had hoped that he would use the report as justification for further restricting arms sales to the country. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and Congress approved another $14 billion in emergency funding last month.
Mr. Biden ordered the report with a national security memorandum called NSM-20. It requires all recipients of U.S. military assistance involved in a conflict to provide written assurances to the United States that they will comply with international law and will not impede the delivery of humanitarian assistance provided or supported by the U.S. government.
The report called on the secretary of state and defense to investigate “any credible reports or allegations” that American weapons may have been used in violation of international law.
Since the presidential memorandum was released, an independent task force formed in response released a detailed report citing dozens of examples of likely Israeli violations. That report found that Israel had committed “systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law” in densely populated areas, including “attacks carried out despite foreseeably disproportionate harm to civilians.”
In a statement following the State Department report, the task force called the U.S. document “incomplete at best and intentionally misleading at worst in defending actions and behavior that are likely to violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes.”
“Once again, the Biden administration faced the facts — and then drew the curtain,” said task force members, who include Josh Paul, a former State Department official who died in October in protest of military support Israel resigned from the US.
The State Department report showed clear sympathy for Israel’s military challenge and reiterated previous statements from the Biden administration that Israel had a “right to self-defense” after the October 7 Hamas attacks. It also noted that military experts describe Gaza as “as difficult a battlespace as any military has experienced in modern warfare.”
“Because Hamas uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes and civilians as human shields, in an active war zone of this type it is often difficult to determine the facts on the ground and the presence of legitimate military targets throughout the Gaza Strip,” it said.
However, numerous specific incidents were highlighted in which the Israeli military had killed civilians or aid workers, with the latter described as a “particular area of concern”.
Those incidents include the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April. The report said Israel fired officers and reprimanded commanders involved in the attack, which Israel called a “serious mistake” and is considering criminal prosecution.
Other incidents included airstrikes on October 31 and November 1 on the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, which reportedly killed dozens of civilians, including children. It noted Israel’s claim that it attacked a senior Hamas commander and underground Hamas facilities at the site and that its munitions “caused the collapse of tunnels and the buildings and infrastructure above them.”
And while the report did not find that Israel had intentionally obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid, it listed several examples of how its government had “a negative impact” on the distribution of aid. These included “extensive bureaucratic delays” and the active involvement of some senior Israeli officials in protests or attacks on aid convoys.
The report was submitted to Congress two days after the deadline set in Mr. Biden’s February memorandum and arrived late Friday afternoon – the timing of choice for administration officials hoping to minimize the public impact of an announcement. Earlier in the day, a White House spokesman, John F. Kirby, denied that the delay had a “nefarious” motive.
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2024-05-11 04:35:06
www.nytimes.com
