The US is monitoring nearly 500 cases of civilian casualties during Israel’s war in Gaza

WASHINGTON. U.S. State Department officials identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza using U.S.-supplied weapons, but took no action on any of them, three sources, including a U.S. official familiar with the matter, said. said this week.

The incidents, some of which sources say may have violated international humanitarian law, have been reported since October 7, 2023, when the war in Gaza began. They are collected by the State Department’s Civilian Casualty Response Guide, a formal mechanism for tracking and evaluating any reports of US-origin gun abuse.

State Department officials gathered information about the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reports, civil society groups, and foreign government contacts.

The mechanism, which was created in August 2023 to apply to all countries receiving American weapons, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment and coordinated departmental action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.

None of the cases in Gaza have yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the case. Options, the former official said, could range from working with the Israeli government to help mitigate the damage to suspending existing arms export licenses or denying future permits.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.

The Biden administration said it was reasonable to assess whether Israel violated international law during the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was “very difficult work,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.

“We do these investigations, and we do them thoroughly, and we do them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it’s important that we don’t rush to a predetermined outcome and don’t skip any work,” Miller said, adding that Washington has consistently raised concerns about civilian harm with Israel.

President Joe Biden’s administration has long said it has yet to make a final assessment of the incident, in which Israel violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.

John Rumming Chappell, an attorney and legal adviser to the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said the Biden administration has “consistently bowed to Israeli authorities and refused to conduct its own investigations.”

“The US government has not done enough to investigate the Israeli military’s use of weapons made in the United States and paid for by American taxpayers,” he said.

The civilian harm process looks not only at potential violations of international law, but at any incident in which civilians are killed or injured that involves U.S. weapons and whether it could have been avoided or mitigated, one U.S. official said , who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A review of the incident could lead to a recommendation that the unit needs additional training or other equipment, as well as more serious consequences, the official said.

Israel’s military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave’s health authorities.

The latest bloodshed in the decade-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict came on October 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting another 250, according to Israeli figures. Reuters