Washington (Quds News Network)- The United States has failed to take action on about 500 reports of Gaza civilians being harmed and killed by Israeli forces with US-supplied weapons during the ongoing genocide war.
According to The Washington Post and Reuters, the incidents have been collected since October 7, 2023 by the US Department of State’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.
Among the cases submitted to the State Department, according to people familiar with the matter, are the January killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in their vehicle, with pieces of a US-made 120mm tank round purportedly found at the scene.
There were shards of US-made small-diameter bombs photographed at a family’s home and at a school sheltering displaced civilians after air attacks in May killed dozens of women and children.
And there was the tail fin of a Boeing-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition on the scene of a July attack that killed dozens of Palestinians.
State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and other sources, including media reports, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.
The mechanism was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US weapons.
It has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.
None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter.
Options, the former official told Reuters, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licences or withholding future approvals.
The administration of President Joe Biden has said it is reasonable to assess that Israel has breached international law in the assault.
John Ramming Chappell, a legal and policy adviser focused on US security assistance and arms sales at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told the Post that US officials were “ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the Netanyahu government”.
“When it comes to the Biden administration’s arms policies, everything looks good on paper but has turned out meaningless in practice when it comes to Israel,” he added.
Mike Casey, who worked on Gaza issues at the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem, told the Post that senior officials routinely gave the impression that their goal in discussing any alleged abuse by Israel was to figure out how to frame it in a less negative light.
“There’s this sense of: ‘How do we make this okay?’” Casey, who resigned in July, was quoted as saying. “There’s not, ‘How do we get to the real truth of what’s going on here?’”
Senior officials, he said, often dismissed the credibility of Palestinian sources, witness accounts, nongovernmental organisations, official accounts from the Palestinian Authority, and even from the United Nations.
William D Hartung, an expert on the arms industry and the US military budget at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Post that “it’s almost impossible” that Israel is not violating US law “given the level of slaughter that’s going on, and the preponderance of US weapons”.
More than 43,163 people have been killed since October 7 last year, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
