STATE DEPARTMENT LAWYERS REPEATEDLY RAISED CONCERNS
Even before the U.S. gathered war crimes intelligence from within the Israeli military, some lawyers at the State Department, which oversees legal assessments of foreign military conduct, repeatedly raised concerns with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes, according to five former U.S. officials.
As early as December 2023, lawyers from the State Department's legal bureau told Blinken in meetings that they believed Israel's military conduct in Gaza likely amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and potentially war crimes, two of the U.S. officials said.
But they never made a conclusive assessment that Israel was violating international humanitarian law, a move that other U.S. officials at the State Department saw as the legal bureau pulling its punches.
"They saw their job as being justifying a political decision," one of the former U.S. officials said. "Even when the evidence clearly pointed to war crimes, the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card was proving intent," one of the officials said.