Jake Johnson
The Biden
administration has reportedly received around 500 notices from international
humanitarian groups, nonprofit organizations, and eyewitnesses alleging that
the Israeli military has used American weaponry in attacks that harmed
civilians in the Gaza Strip, likely in violation of both U.S. and international
law.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of relatives killed by an Israeli attack in Beit Lahiya, Gaza on October 29, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
But the
administration, which has armed Israel's military to the hilt since the
Hamas-led attack of last year, "has failed to comply with its own policies
requiring swift investigations of such claims," according to The
Washington Post, which first reported the nearly 500 notices on Wednesday.
Dozens of the
reports delivered to the U.S. State Department over the past year "include
photo documentation of U.S.-made bomb fragments at sites where scores of
children were killed," the Post noted, citing unnamed human rights
advocates who were briefed on the process.
"Yet
despite the State Department’s internal Civilian Harm Incident Response
Guidance, which directs officials to complete an investigation and recommend
action within two months of launching an inquiry, no single case has reached
the 'action' stage," the newspaper reported, citing unnamed current and
former officials. "More than two-thirds of cases remain unresolved... with
many pending response from the Israeli government, which the State Department
consults to verify each case's circumstances."
John Ramming
Chappell, a legal and policy adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict,
told the Post that Biden administration officials are "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," Chappell added,
"everything looks good on paper but has turned out meaningless in practice
when it comes to Israel."
William Hartung,
a senior research fellow and arms industry expert at the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft, told the Post that "it's almost impossible"
that Israel isn't violating U.S. law "given the level of slaughter that's
going on, and the preponderance of U.S. weapons."
Since last
October, the U.S. has delivered more than 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel, a
flow of arms that has continued amid overwhelming evidence that the Israeli
military has used American weapons to commit grave violations of international
law.
In April, as
Common Dreamsreported at the time, Amnesty International USA sent a research
brief to the Biden administration detailing several cases in which the Israeli
military violated international humanitarian law with U.S. weapons, including a
pair of deadly strikes last year on homes full of civilians—attacks that killed
19 children.
On Tuesday, the
Israeli military bombed a five-story residential building in northern Gaza,
killing around two dozen children and scores of adults.
Matthew Miller,
a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, told reporters Tuesday that the
Biden administration is "deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life in
this incident" and has "reached out to the government of Israel to
ask what has happened here."
Later in the
same briefing, reporters pressed Miller on actions the Biden administration is
taking to push Israel to stop impeding shipments of humanitarian assistance to
Gaza. It's been just over two weeks since the Biden administration sent a
letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off U.S. military
assistance if the humanitarian situation in Gaza doesn't improve within 30
days.
"Obviously,
the 30 days isn't up," Drop Site's Ryan Grim noted during Tuesday's press
briefing. "But two weeks ago the situation in northern Gaza was bad; like,
today it's utterly dystopian. The opposite of making progress has happened there."
Miller responded
that "we have made clear that the situation in northern Gaza... needs to
change."
Nevertheless,
Miller insisted to reporters that the U.S. State Department has "not
assessed [Israel] to be in violation of the law at this point," a
statement that contradicts the findings of both internal department experts and
outside analysts.
"All the
laws and policies that are supposed to prevent U.S. weapons from being used to
commit atrocities by foreign countries are being completely ignored by the
Biden admin in its rush to continue unimpeded weapons flows to Israel to commit
genocide," Josh Ruebner, policy director at the IMEU Policy Project, wrote
Wednesday.
Israeli occupation forces killed 93
Palestinians, including 25 children, in an airstrike on a residential building
in Beit Lahia, located in the northern Gaza Strip, where the Zionist Army has
maintained an intense military siege for 24 days.
The body of a Palestinian woman hangs from
the window of the bombed building, Beit Lahia, Gaza, Oct. 29, 2024.
(Photo: X/ @ahmedgaza24)
The
five-story building housed hundreds of displaced civilians who reported that
the Israeli siege on the three main hospitals in northern Gaza now prevents
dozens of wounded people from receiving medical care due to a lack of resources
and doctors.
Palestinian
media reported another airstrike shortly afterward near the Kamal Adwan
Hospital, also in Beit Lahia, where some of the bombing victims had already
been taken. The Gazan government confirmed that more than 40 people are
currently missing under the rubble of the bombed building.
“The
Israeli occupation army knew that this residential building housed dozens of
displaced civilians, and that the majority were children and women,” criticized
the government of Gaza.
According
to the ministry of Health in Gaza, 115 Palestinians killed in Israeli raids on
the Gaza Strip since dawn today, 109 of them in the northern Gaza Strip
Out
of the 109 in the North, 93 were killed in the Beit Lahia massacre earlier this
morning. pic.twitter.com/ljNtzhq2fF
“The
Civil Defense work system has been completely dismantled by Israeli aggression
in northern Gaza, the arrest of its workers, and the displacement of others,”
said Mahmud Basal, spokesperson for the emergency services, noting that they
continue to receive alerts about this attack in Beit Lahia.
Videos
shared after the massacre show dozens of bodies wrapped in blankets lying
beside the rubble of the attacked building. For 24 days, Israel has maintained
a military siege on northern Gaza, combining an intense bombing campaign with a
ground incursion, which has killed over a thousand people.
On
Monday night, two additional Israeli attacks on homes in Beit Lahia killed at
least seven people, reported Wafa, which also mentioned a fire caused by the
Army—without specifying if it was due to troops or a projectile—at the Al
Fakhoura school, linked to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Since
the start of the offensive against Gaza in October 2023, Israeli occupation
forces have killed at least 43,020 Palestinians and injured 101,110 people,
according to records from the Gazan Health Ministry.
Nicholas R. Micinski
(The Conversation) – The Israeli
parliament’s vote on Oct. 28, 2024, to ban the United Nations agency that
provides relief for Palestinian refugees is likely to affect millions of people
– it also fits a pattern.
Aid for refugees, particularly
Palestinian refugees, has long been politicized, and the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, has been targeted throughout
its 75-year history.
This was evident earlier in the
current Gaza conflict, when at least a dozen countries, including the U.S.,
suspended funding to the UNRWA, citing allegations made by Israel that 12 UNRWA
employees participated in the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. In August, the
U.N. fired nine UNRWA employees for alleged involvement in the attack. An
independent U.N. panel established a set of 50 recommendations to ensure UNRWA
employees adhere to the principle of neutrality.
The vote by the Knesset, Israel’s
parliament, to ban the UNRWA goes a step further. It will, when it comes into
effect, prevent the UNRWA from operating in Israel and will severely affect its
ability to serve refugees in any of the occupied territories that Israel
controls, including Gaza. This could have devastating consequences for
livelihoods, health, the distribution of food aid and schooling for
Palestinians. It would also damage the polio vaccination campaign that the
UNRWA and its partner organizations have been carrying out in Gaza since
September. Finally, the bill bans communication between Israeli officials and
the UNRWA, which would end efforts by the agency to coordinate the movements of
aid workers to prevent unintentional targeting by the Israel Defense Forces.
Refugee aid, and humanitarian aid
more generally, is theoretically meant to be neutral and impartial. But as
experts in migration and international relations, we know funding is often used
as a foreign policy tool, whereby allies are rewarded and enemies punished. In
this context, we believe Israel’s banning of the UNRWA fits a wider pattern of
the politicization of aid to refugees, particularly Palestinian refugees.
What is the UNRWA?
The UNRWA, short for United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was
established two years after about 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled
from their homes during the months leading up to the creation of the state of
Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war.
Prior to the UNRWA’s creation,
international and local organizations, many of them religious, provided
services to displaced Palestinians. But after surveying the extreme poverty and
dire situation pervasive across refugee camps, the U.N. General Assembly,
including all Arab states and Israel, voted to create the UNRWA in 1949.
Since that time, the UNRWA has been
the primary aid organization providing food, medical care, schooling and, in
some cases, housing for the 6 million Palestinians living across its five
fields: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as the areas that make up the occupied
Palestinian territories: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The mass displacement of
Palestinians – known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” – occurred prior to the
1951 Refugee Convention, which defined refugees as anyone with a well-founded
fear of persecution owing to “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951.”
Despite a 1967 protocol extending the definition worldwide, Palestinians are
still excluded from the primary international system protecting refugees.
While the UNRWA is responsible for
providing services to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations also created the
U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1948 to seek a long-term
political solution and “to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and
economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of
compensation.”
As a result, UNRWA does not have a
mandate to push for the traditional durable solutions available in other
refugee situations. As it happened, the conciliation commission was active only
for a few years and has since been sidelined in favor of the U.S.-brokered
peace processes.
Is the UNRWA political?
The UNRWA has been subject to
political headwinds since its inception and especially during periods of
heightened tension between Palestinians and Israelis.
While it is a U.N. organization and
thus ostensibly apolitical, it has frequently been criticized by Palestinians,
Israelis as well as donor countries, including the United States, for acting
politically.
The UNRWA performs statelike
functions across its five fields, including education, health and
infrastructure, but it is restricted in its mandate from performing political
or security activities.
Initial Palestinian objections to
the UNRWA stemmed from the organization’s early focus on economic integration
of refugees into host states.
Although the UNRWA officially
adhered to the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 194 that called for the
return of Palestine refugees to their homes, U.N., U.K. and U.S. officials
searched for means by which to resettle and integrate Palestinians into host
states, viewing this as the favorable political solution to the Palestinian
refugee situation and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this sense,
Palestinians perceived the UNRWA to be both highly political and actively
working against their interests.
In later decades, the UNRWA switched
its primary focus from jobs to education at the urging of Palestinian refugees.
But the UNRWA’s education materials were viewed by Israel as further feeding
Palestinian militancy, and the Israeli government insisted on checking and
approving all materials in Gaza and the West Bank, which it has occupied since
1967.
While Israel has long been
suspicious of the UNRWA’s role in refugee camps and in providing education, the
organization’s operation, which is internationally funded, also saves Israel
millions of dollars each year in services it would be obliged to deliver as the
occupying power.
Since the 1960s, the U.S. – the
UNRWA’s primary donor – and other Western countries have repeatedly expressed
their desire to use aid to prevent radicalization among refugees.
In response to the increased
presence of armed opposition groups, the U.S. attached a provision to its UNRWA
aid in 1970, requiring that the “UNRWA take all possible measures to assure
that no part of the United States contribution shall be used to furnish
assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the
so-called Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) or any other guerrilla-type
organization.”
The UNRWA adheres to this
requirement, even publishing an annual list of its employees so that host
governments can vet them, but it also employs 30,000 individuals, the vast
majority of whom are Palestinian.
Questions over links of the UNRWA to
any militancy has led to the rise of Israeli and international watch groups
that document the social media activity of the organization’s large Palestinian
staff.
In 2018, the Trump administration
paused its US$60 million contribution to the UNRWA. Trump claimed the pause
would create political pressure for Palestinians to negotiate. President Joe
Biden restarted U.S. contributions to the UNRWA in 2021.
While other major donors restored
funding to the UNRWA after the conclusion of the investigation in April, the
U.S. has yet to do so.
‘An unmitigated disaster’
Israel’s ban of the UNRWA will leave
already starving Palestinians without a lifeline. U.N. Secretary General
António Guterres said banning the UNRWA “would be a catastrophe in what is
already an unmitigated disaster.” The foreign ministers of Canada, Australia,
France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. issued a joint statement
arguing that the ban would have “devastating consequences on an already
critical and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation, particularly in
northern Gaza.”
Reports have emerged of Israeli
plans for private security contractors to take over aid distribution in Gaza
through dystopian “gated communities,” which would in effect be internment
camps. This would be a troubling move. In contrast to the UNRWA, private
contractors have little experience delivering aid and are not dedicated to the
humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality or independence.
However, the Knesset’s explicit ban
could, inadvertently, force the United States to suspend weapons transfers to
Israel. U.S. law requires that it stop weapons transfers to any country that
obstructs the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. And the U.S. pause on funding
for the UNRWA was only meant to be temporary.
The UNRWA is the main conduit for
assistance into Gaza, and the Knesset’s ban makes explicit that the Israeli
government is preventing aid delivery, making it harder for Washington to
ignore. Before the bill passed, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Matt Miller
warned that “passage of the legislation could have implications under U.S. law
and U.S. policy.”
At the same time, two U.S.
government agencies previously alerted the Biden administration that Israel was
obstructing aid into Gaza, yet weapons transfers have continued unabated.
Sections of this story were first used in an earlier
article published by The Conversation U.S. on Feb. 1, 2024
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