The Biden administration believes that Israel most likely violated international norms by failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but has found no specific cases that justify withholding 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 to mitigate civilian harm in its operations.” military.”
But he added that “the results on the ground, including the high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial doubts” about whether the Israel Defense Forces are making sufficient use of those tools.
Still, the report, which in some ways seemed self-contradictory, said the United States had no compelling evidence of Israeli violations. He noted the difficulty of gathering 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 American weapons have been used in specific incidents that allegedly involved violations of laws. of human rights.
The report, commissioned by President Biden, also draws a distinction between the general possibility that Israel violated the law and any findings about specific incidents that prove it. He considers assurances Israel gave in March that it would use American weapons in accordance with international law to be “credible and reliable” and therefore allow for the continued flow of American military aid.
The conclusions are unrelated to Biden’s recent decision to delay the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel 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 gathering reliable information from the war zone and the way Hamas operates in densely populated areas. He also emphasized that Israel has begun to seek possible accountability for alleged violations of the law, a key component in the United States’ assessment of whether it should provide military aid to allies accused of human rights violations.
Israel has opened criminal investigations into its military’s conduct in Gaza, according to the report, 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 to Gaza.
While he concluded that both “Israel’s action and inaction” had slowed the flow of aid to Gaza, which desperately lacks necessities such as food and medicine, he said that “we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transportation or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” to the territory.
Such a finding would have triggered a US law that would prohibit military aid to countries that blocked such assistance.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer now with the International Crisis Group, said the report “goes to great lengths” to avoid concluding that Israel broke any laws, a finding that would put significant new pressure on Biden to restrict the weapons to the country.
Finucane, a critic of Israel’s military operations, said the report was “more communicative” than he expected, but that he still found it “watered down” and very “defensive.”
The findings further angered a minority of Democrats in Congress who have become increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They argue that Israel has indiscriminately killed civilians with American weapons and has intentionally hindered humanitarian aid provided by the United States.
Either option would violate US laws governing arms transfers to foreign militaries, as well as international humanitarian law, which is largely based on the Geneva Conventions.
The report did not define the meaning of its other criteria for Israel’s actions, “establishing best practices for mitigating harm to civilians,” although it cited Defense Department guidelines on the topic published last year, which include some measures “not required by the law of war. .”
“If this conduct meets international standards, then God help us all,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told reporters after the report’s release. “They don’t want to have to take any steps to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for what’s happening,” he added, referring to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Critics of Biden’s continuation of most military support for Israel hoped he would use the report as justification to further restrict arms deliveries to the country. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and last month Congress approved an additional $14 billion in emergency funding.
Biden ordered the report with a national security memorandum known as NSM-20. Requires all recipients of U.S. military aid involved in a conflict to provide the United States with written assurances that they will comply with international law and will not impede the delivery of humanitarian aid provided or supported by the U.S. government.
The report called on the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense to evaluate “any credible reports or allegations” that U.S. weapons may have been used in violation of international law.
Since the president’s memo was released, an independent working group formed in response issued a lengthy report citing dozens of examples of possible Israeli legal violations. That report found what it called Israel’s “systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law,” including “strikes launched despite foreseeably disproportionate harm to civilians” in densely populated areas.
In a statement following the State Department report, the working group called the U.S. document “at best incomplete and at worst intentionally misleading in its defense of acts and behavior that likely violate international humanitarian law.” and may constitute war crimes.”
“Once again, the Biden Administration has looked the facts in the face and then closed the curtains,” said members of the task force, including Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in October in protests US military support for Israel.
The State Department report showed clear sympathy for Israel’s military challenge, repeating previous statements by the Biden administration that Israel has “the right to defend itself” following the October 7 Hamas attacks. He also noted that military experts call Gaza “as difficult a battle space as any army has faced in modern warfare.”
“Because Hamas uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes and civilians as human shields, it is often difficult to determine the facts on the ground in an active war zone of this nature and the presence of legitimate military targets throughout Gaza,” he said.
Still, he highlighted numerous specific incidents in which Israel’s military had killed civilians or aid workers, the latter of which he called a “specific area of concern.”
Those episodes include the murder of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April. The report noted that Israel fired officers and reprimanded commanders involved in that attack, which Israel called “a serious mistake” and is considering prosecution.
Other episodes he cited included airstrikes on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 on the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, which reportedly killed dozens of civilians, including children. He took note of Israel’s claim that it had attacked a senior Hamas commander and underground Hamas facilities at the site, and that its munitions had “caused the collapse of the tunnels and the buildings and infrastructure above them.”
And while the report did not find that Israel had intentionally hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid, it listed several examples of ways its government had “a negative effect” on aid distribution. They included “extensive bureaucratic delays” and what he called the active participation of some senior Israeli officials in protests or attacks on aid convoys.
The report was delivered to Congress two days after the deadline set by Biden’s February memo and arrived on a Friday afternoon, the timing chosen by administration officials hoping to minimize the public impact of an announcement. That same day, a White House spokesman, John F. Kirby, denied that the delay had any “nefarious” reason.