EU: there is no evidence of Israeli actions that violate international law

Washington y Nueva York. The murder of seven humanitarian aid workers from the United States-based World Central Kitchen organization prompted President Joe Biden to express condolences, but his spokesman John Kirby dared to declare that this attack like all others in the last 5 Six months to date, the US government has not detected that any Israeli action has violated international law.

In a week where Joe Biden’s government acknowledged that it is sending Israel more than the 2,000-pound mega-bombs with the capacity to destroy entire neighborhoods and is contemplating sending more F-15 fighter planes, the Israeli attack that killed aid workers traveling in clearly marked vehicles and whose movement had been previously reported to the Israeli military has sparked anger and condemnation.

The founder of World Central Kitchen (WCK), Spanish chef José Andrés, is well known in the elite circuit in Washington where some of his very popular restaurants are located. As the war’s death toll in Gaza mounts, his efforts to bring aid to that region have been widely covered in the media, along with the conditions he has witnessed.

President Biden issued a statement expressing his “outrage” over the deaths of aid workers in what he called a “tragedy,” demanded a full investigation into Israel, and stressed that this was not an exceptional incident as too many aid workers have died. in Gaza and accused that “Israel has not done enough to protect civilians” in that “conflict.” But he avoided stating that the attack was a crime or that it would change his policy toward Israel’s war.

He added that he spoke this Tuesday with his “friend” José Andrés to express his condolences and support for the “heroic efforts” of his organization in Gaza. He did not address WCK’s demand that Israel had to stop “indiscriminate killing” in the area.

But this Tuesday, at the White House, Kirby was asked if “firing a missile at humanitarian workers and killing them, isn’t that a violation of international law?” Kirby insisted that “your question assumes it was a deliberate attack……there is no evidence of that.” This is despite the fact, as noted by several human rights experts, that the vehicles had large WCK logos painted on their roofs and that they were two kilometers from each other when the missiles were fired and that they received multiple munitions.

But the White House spokesman for national security affairs did not stop there. He stated that “we continue to observe incidents when they occur, the State Department has a process in place, and to date…they have not found any incidents where Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.”

In that round with the press, another incredulous reporter then asked if the United States has concluded that the Israelis “have never, ever violated international humanitarian law in the last 5 or 6 months.” Kirby responded that the State Department “watches these issues in real time, they have not found any incidents where they have violated international law.”

But as Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute in Washington, commented, the United States provided the weapons that killed the aid workers along with more than 30,000 other people in Gaza. And as the Washington Post reported last Friday, while the Biden administration publicly expressed concern about the growing death toll in Gaza and the possibility of a new Israeli offensive along with these recent deaths, the Pentagon already approved this last week the transfer of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, 500 500-pound bombs and the possible transfer of fighter planes. Those 2,000-pound bombs have caused “massive casualty events,” as the Post reports, throughout Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Bruce Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, said in a tweet Tuesday that when an Iranian-backed armed group kills American citizens in a drone attack in Jordan, the United States responds with missile attacks against Iranian groups, but “when Israel kills a citizen in a drone attack in Gaza, the United States response is to send more weapons to Israel.”

But as is often the case in the United States, the death of one American citizen could force some change in policy more than the death of 30,000 Palestinians.

And it is sure to further intensify the growing protests Biden faces over his policy of complicity with Israel. In primaries in four states held this Tuesday – New York State, Wisconsin, Connecticut and Rhode Island – many Democratic Party voters are expected to cast “unpledged” votes or leave blank ballots in protest against Biden, thus raising the cost politician to support Israel’s war against Gaza.