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On Friday the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, presented to the US Congress a report on the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and in particular on the practices adopted by Israel for the protection of civilians, the use of weapons and the sending of humanitarian aid.
According to relationship it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons and ammunition sent by the United States to Israel were used improperly and “not in line” with humanitarian law, for example to kill or injure civilians. At the same time, however, the State Department has not found irrefutable evidence of possible violations, and has therefore established that at the moment it is not possible to conclude with certainty that Israel has violated international law.
The report points to several incidents in which it is considered likely that US weapons were used to injure or kill civilians, but does not reach any definitive conclusions. In December an investigation by New York Times had demonstrated that Israel used particularly powerful bombs in densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip: those devices, known as2.000-pound bombs” (because they weigh two thousand pounds, about 900 kilograms) had also been sent to Israel from the United States.
Since the war began last October, more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in the Gaza Strip. According to the State Department, such a high number of civilian victims “raises serious doubts” regarding the Israeli army’s respect for humanitarian law. At the same time, however, the report claims that Israel has “the knowledge, experience and tools necessary to limit harm against civilians in its military operations.” The New York Times he wrote that, in some passages, the report “seems to contradict itself.”
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The study also accuses Israel of not having done enough to allow the arrival of humanitarian aid in the Strip, but not even in this case does it go so far as to accuse the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of having voluntarily blocked deliveries.
The document refers to the period from the beginning of the war to last April. The investigation, announced last February, was conducted as part of the Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance (CHIRG), mechanism introduced by the Biden administration in the summer of 2023 for to monitor any abuses committed by countries receiving military aid from the United States.
If it had been confirmed that Israel was violating international law, the United States could have limited or stopped the supply of weapons and ammunition. Regardless of the State Department’s conclusions, this is already partly happening: on Tuesday the United States suspended the shipment of a new shipment of weapons that would probably have been used by the Israeli army in the invasion of Rafah, the city of south of the Gaza Strip where 1.4 million Palestinian civilians have taken refuge in recent months. The blocked weapons shipment included more than 3 thousand bombs.
Biden also harshly criticized the Israeli army’s actions in the Strip on Wednesday, saying for the first time that the United States is ready to suspend sending further shipments of weapons if Israel invades Rafah.