Senior US and Israeli officials will hold talks in early December in the first meeting of a new channel requested by Washington to raise concerns over civilian harm in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller has said.
According to Reuters, an October 13 letter from officials in President Joe Biden’s administration to Israel’s government said previous channels were not working and asked for a new channel to meet virtually before the end of that month.
Miller said at a press briefing that a first meeting had been scheduled to gather information about incidents involving Israel’s use of US-provided weapons that are “a cause of concern or a cause of question”. He declined to say where the meeting would take place.
“We take all the information we gather… and feed it into our processes, both our policy making processes and the judgments that we have to make about potential violations of international humanitarian law, and we will continue to do that,” Miller added.
Miller declined to say whether the new channel would accelerate US government assessments of potential violations of international law by Israel, and did not commit to any assessments concluding before Biden leaves office on January 20.
“Our work is already moving as quickly as we can possibly make it move, but they are difficult assessments that we have to make,” he said.
