US-Israel panel to look into civilian harm in Gaza is set for first meeting next month

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration says a U.S.-Israel panel to look into reports of civilian harm from the war in Gaza will meet for the first time in early December, missing by more than a month a U.S. call for the channel to be set up by the end of October.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday that the upcoming meeting had been agreed to after much discussion between U.S. and Israeli officials on specific incidents and reports of civilian casualties involving American-made or -supplied weapons.

“The purpose of this channel is to inform the ongoing work that the State Department has to make assessments about the use of U.S.-provided weapons,” Miller told reporters. “It’s to gather information about incidents that have been raised that are cause of concern or cause of questions.”

He said the information gathered through that channel will inform U.S. policy decisions about any response to potential violations of international humanitarian law in the conflict that has been raging since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which led to its retaliatory offensives in Gaza.

Experts say famine may already have set in in northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging a weekslong offensive that has killed hundreds of people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.

In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to top Israeli officials warning them that the Biden administration might limit the provision of some U.S. weapons systems to Israel, a close ally, if action to improve humanitarian conditions was not taken within 30 days.

That deadline expired last week with no decisions being made on military aid and officials saying that Israel had taken some positive steps but was still not meeting the criteria for improvements laid out in the letter.

Aid groups say the situation in Gaza has actually deteriorated instead of improved and urged the U.S. to respond accordingly.

The theft in Gaza over the weekend of nearly 100 trucks loaded with food and other much-needed humanitarian aid sent prices soaring and caused shortages in central Gaza, where most of the population of 2.3 million people have fled and where hundreds of thousands are crammed into squalid tent camps.

Miller said reports of such incidents demonstrated a breakdown in law and order in Gaza and underscored the need to end the fighting and restore functioning governance to the territory.

“You are not going to fully, finally solve this problem without an end to the war and the establishment of a new governance and security authority inside Gaza, because ultimately that is the problem,” he said.