US tracking nearly 500 incidents of civilians harmed by US weapons during Gaza war

US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilians being harmed by US-supplied weapons during Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, Reuters has reported. However, no further action has been taken on any of them, three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter, said this week.

The incidents — some of which might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources — have been recorded since 7 October last year. They are being collected by the State Department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts. The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, 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 explained, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licences or withholding future approvals.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday. The State Department declined to comment on the story. In August, deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said that Washington was reviewing “very closely” reports of alleged violations of international law and listed the civilian harm process as one of the policies at the department’s disposal.

The administration of President Joe Biden has long said that it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza. However, according to John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal adviser at the Centre for Civilians in Conflict, the Biden administration “has consistently deferred to Israeli authorities and declined to do its own investigations. The US government hasn’t done nearly enough to investigate how the Israeli military uses weapons made in the United States and paid for by US taxpayers.”

Another US official told Reuters that the US Embassy in Jerusalem has raised a number of incidents with Israel under the guidance.

The process not only looks at potential violations of international law, but also at any incident where civilians are killed or injured and where US weapons are implicated, and looks at whether this could have been avoided or reduced, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A review of an incident can lead to a recommendation that a unit needs more training or different equipment, as well as more severe consequences, the official pointed out.

Israel’s military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and wounded 101,000 more, with an estimated 11,000 missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel.

What has been described as “plausible” evidence of genocide by the International Court of Justice, and “settler-colonial genocide” by the UN special rapporteur on occupied Palestine, Francesca Albanese, started after a Hamas-led cross-border incursion on 7 October 2023. Around 1,200 Israelis were killed, many of them by Israel Defence Forces personnel carrying out the controversial Hannibal Directive to kill Israeli citizens rather than let them be taken captive.

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