Senior American and Israeli officials will meet “in early December” as part of a new channel of discussions to assess whether the use of American weapons led to deliberate deaths of civilians in Gaza, announced Tuesday Department of State.
The United States, Israel’s primary political and military supporter, has repeatedly expressed its fears about civilian casualties caused by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip without, however, ever calling into question its massive military aid.
The State Department has opened a number of investigations into Israeli strikes that caused the deaths of civilians in Gaza using weapons supplied by the United States, which would be contrary to American law. To date, no conclusions have been made public.
“We have planned a meeting between senior officials of the department and senior officials of the Israeli government at the beginning of December. This will be the first meeting of this new channel,” the spokesperson for the department of State, Matthew Miller. He declined to specify where the meeting would take place.
“The purpose of this channel is to inform the State Department of the work it must do to evaluate the use of the weapons that we have provided,” Mr. Miller said, announcing “a a number of events about which we have questions and concerns.
This “does not mean that we did not seek to obtain answers through existing channels (…) but we created this new channel because we wanted to formalize a mechanism to obtain answers to some of these questions,” he explained.
The same day, senators from the American left called on the Biden administration to stop sending weapons to Israel, accusing it of being “complicit” in “atrocities” in Gaza.
“What makes the situation even more painful is that most of what is happening there is being done with American weapons and with the support of American taxpayers,” lamented Senator Bernie Sanders during a conference press.
Israeli operations caused a humanitarian disaster in the Palestinian territory and left 43,972 dead, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas Ministry of Health, deemed reliable by the UN.
They intervene in retaliation for the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, which led to the death of 1,206 people, mainly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data.
