Israel Hamas war, humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza as fighting intensifies
An investigation by Amnesty International alleges that a US-made weapons guidance system was used in two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in October in which 43 civilians are said to have been killed.
Fragments of the US-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions guidance system were found in the rubble of destroyed homes in the neighborhood of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, according to a report released Tuesday by the human rights organization.
Israel uses a wide variety of American weapons and munitions, but Amnesty’s report is one of the first attempts to tie an American-made weapon to a specific attack that left a significant number of civilians dead.
The JDAM is a “guidance tail kit that converts existing unguided free-fall bombs into accurate, adverse weather ‘smart’ munitions,” according to the US Air Force.
CNN cannot independently verify Amnesty’s findings.
Amnesty said its weapons experts and a “remote sensing analyst” examined satellite imagery and photos of the homes that show the “fragments of ordnance recovered from the rubble” and the destruction, the report explains. Amnesty’s fieldworkers took the photos.
As a result of these two attacks, 19 children, 14 women, and 10 men were killed, the report claims.
The human rights organization said it “did not find any indication there were any military objectives at the sites” of the airstrikes or that the individuals living in the homes were legitimate military targets.
“The organization found that these air strikes were either direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects or indiscriminate attacks,” the report says, calling for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.
In a statement to CNN, the Israel Defense Forces called the report “flawed, biased and premature, based on baseless assumptions regarding the IDF’s operations.”
“The assumption that intelligence regarding the military use of a particular structure does not exist unless revealed is contradictory to any understanding of military activity, and the report uses this flawed assumption to imply equally flawed and biased conclusions regarding the IDF, in line with existing biases and prior problematic work by this organization,” the IDF said.
