The US coordinated closely with Israel on massive strikes in Gaza on residential buildings, knowing that more than 100 civilians would be killed even though Israel didn’t have precise intelligence about the location of a Hamas commander it was claiming to target, the Israeli outlet 972 Magazine reported on Thursday.
The report also detailed how Israel weaponized deadly carbon monoxide gas released by conventional bombs underground to kill Hamas commanders hiding in the tunnels, and in some cases, the gas killed Israeli hostages.
The report, which cited 15 Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet officers, said Israel frequently “bombarded residential areas in Gaza when it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding underground.”
In these strikes, the Israeli military authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of Palestinian civilians, which it framed as “collateral damage.” The report said the Israeli military maintained close “real-time coordination” with US officials on these bombings regarding the number of civilian casualties, meaning the US was a direct accomplice in the slaughter.
The Israeli military developed a process known as “tiling,” where they would drop massive 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs on civilian areas above tunnels where they believed a Hamas commander might be located but weren’t sure of the exact area. The report said this “partial intelligence picture led to instances in which the army dropped bunker-buster bombs that killed scores of Palestinians, while the target underground survived.”
One of the most infamous of these types of strikes was the bombing of a densely populated neighborhood in the Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, 2023. The attack was personally approved by IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, knowing it would kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians, which means the US knew as well. A source told 972 that the permissible number of civilian casualties was set at “around 300” to kill a single Hamas battalion commander, Ibrahim Biari.
“A whole neighborhood died for Ibrahim Biari,” another source said. The bombing leveled at least 12 residential buildings, and the bodies of 126 Palestinians were dug out of the rubble, including 68 children.
The 972 report said that while it was never official Israeli policy that all Palestinians in Gaza were responsible for enabling Hamas and the October 7 attack on southern Israel, it was “present in hallway conversations and coffee breaks ‘all the time.'”
The report noted that while the Israeli accusation is that Hamas purposely places its tunnels under densely populated civilian areas, which Hamas denies, the Israeli military also has underground military facilities near residential areas in Israel. In comments to 972, Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer, referenced “the Pit,” the nickname for an underground Israeli military operations center near residential areas of Tel Aviv.
“Imagine this was Tel Aviv and not Jabalia, and that in order to reach ‘the Pit,’ the neighborhoods around the Kirya would be bombed,” Sfard said. “You don’t know where the military tunnels under the Kirya reach, you don’t know exactly where your target is, and you want to make sure he is killed. So you bomb [the adjacent streets]? Nobody would accept such a thing.”
Throughout Israel’s genocidal war, members of the Biden administration claimed they were concerned about the high number of civilian casualties in Israel’s bombing campaign. But the 972 report confirms they were accomplices in the worst instances of civilian harm, and they enabled the attacks by providing the bombs.
In an interview shortly before he left office, President Biden essentially admitted that he agreed to support major Israeli massacres of civilians after a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Describing his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden said, “I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war. I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations].”
Biden continued, saying Netanyahu was ” going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy.”
Biden then conceded he thought Netanyahu made a “legitimate” argument that Israel should take out the buildings above the tunnels. “And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective—‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels,'” he said.
