Nearly half of the bombs that Israel has used in its current genocidal assault of Gaza have been designed to maximize civilian harm, a new report reveals.
According to a U.S. assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reported by CNN, about 40 to 45 percent of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been unguided bombs, or what are known as “dumb” bombs.
Due to the lack of GPS guiding technology in these bombs, they are less precise and are therefore more harmful to civilians. This is especially true when they are used in densely populated areas like Gaza.
As a result, such heavy use of unguided bombs is likely accelerating the civilian death toll.
“I’m extremely surprised and concerned,” Brian Castner, a former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer and current Amnesty International arms and military operations adviser, told CNN. “It’s bad enough to be using the weapons when they are precisely hitting their targets. It is a massive civilian harm problem if they do not have that accuracy, and if you can’t even give a benefit of the doubt that the weapon is actually landing where the Israeli forces intended to.”
The report bolsters the argument that Israel has been dropping bombs on Gaza indiscriminately, meaning that the military is not attempting to minimize or avoid civilian death in their bombardments. President Joe Biden acknowledged that Israeli forces are not using such discretion in bombings on Tuesday — but is forging on with military support of Israel even though indiscriminate bombing is widely regarded as a war crime by experts.
The report severely undercuts the main reasoning that Israeli officials and Zionists are giving for the ongoing bombardment of Gaza, which is that Israel must continue the slaughter until it eliminates Hamas — a supposed mission that Israeli forces are carrying out with an enormous, nearly unprecedented amount of civilian death.
It suggests that Israel is, as many anti-Zionist advocates have been saying for weeks, at best indifferent to the fact that it is killing tens of thousands of civilians, and at worst, purposefully killing civilians to fulfill their ultimate goal of the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as some Israeli think tanks and officials have intimated.
U.S. and Israeli officials told CNN that Israeli forces were using a tactic of deploying the missiles that supposedly helps to “verify” that the bombs are hitting their intended targets. However, experts said that the use of the weapons when Israel has access to kits that can convert the bombs into guided ones is astonishing, and possibly a war crime.
Israeli forces “should want to use the most precise weapon that they possibly can in such a densely populated area,” Marc Garlasco, former war crimes investigator and military analyst, told CNN, adding “there are so many variables to take into account that could lead to an incredibly different accuracy from one moment to the next” with unguided bombs.
Garlasco added that the U.S. has phased out use of unguided bombs for their disproportionate risk to civilians, and further condemned their use in a post on social media.
“The revelation [that] almost half of all bombs dropped on Gaza by Israel are unguided dumb bombs completely undercuts their claim of minimizing civilian harm,” Garlasco wrote.
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