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In the waning weeks of President Joe Biden’s first term, the U.S. came into possession of intelligence of Israeli officials discussing their military’s use of Palestinians as human shields in Gaza — but refused to act upon this knowledge, reporting finds.
U.S. officials received intelligence late in 2024 that the Israeli military had sent Palestinians into tunnels they believed were loaded with explosives, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Using civilians as human shields is a crime under international law. U.S. officials said they were unaware of whether the Palestinians were civilians or captives.
This was one in a series of revelations about the Biden administration’s intelligence reports on likely Israeli war crimes — and its refusal to act in Biden’s final weeks in office, even as negotiators were nearing a ceasefire deal that Israel would ultimately unilaterally end.
Last week, Reuters reported that the U.S. had gathered intelligence that Israel’s military lawyers had said there was enough evidence to back war crimes charges against Israel for its military actions in Gaza. This was “among the most startling” intelligence shared with the U.S. during the assault, as it contrasted with Israel’s public statements denying illegal activities, former officials said.
These reports added to intelligence on Israel’s internal analyses of the genocide that circulated around the government in the last weeks of the Biden administration.
It prompted concerns and debate among high level officials about Israel’s conduct within Gaza. These conversations reached such heights that then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly questioned if Israel was committing ethnic cleansing, HuffPost reported last week.
But these “concerns” ultimately never amounted to any conclusions, despite many internal reports of illegal conduct and war crimes brought to officials like Blinken at the time.
“The Biden administration deliberately looked the other way in the face of overwhelming evidence that war crimes were being committed with U.S. weapons in Gaza,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) told Reuters, of the reports.
Analyst and executive vice president at the Quincy Institute Trita Parsi said Israel’s reported use of human shields is “a clear war crime,” adding: “Privately, Biden officials knew and expressed their concerns. Publicly, they defended Israel and denied that Israel was doing this.”
These revelations come on top of The Washington Post’s report last month that the U.S. State Department’s watchdog has found reports of “many hundreds” of potential Israeli human rights in Gaza. But officials claim these reports would take “multiple years” to investigate, likely due to the drawn out and highly deferential process for probes into Israeli human rights violations.
This reported use of Palestinians as human shields was not an isolated incident. Palestinians, human rights groups, and Israeli officers have said that Israel systematically uses Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields.
Rather than take action against this, the Biden administration approved a record amount of military assistance to Israel, and took drastic steps to provide diplomatic cover to Israel. This included a total redefining of the concept of “human shields” — completely separate from its definition under international law — in order to claim, without evidence, that it is Hamas that uses human shields in warfare, not Israel.
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