Aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes with “dumb” bombs
Polygraph | Newsletter n°231 | 3 January 2024
Situation
Israel is drawing from a US weapons stockpile in the country to support its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. All the matériel in the stockpile (known as the War Reserve Stockpile Ammunition–Israel, or WRSA-I) belongs to the US, but Washington has granted Israel access to it before, including in 2006 (to attack Lebanon) and 2014 (to attack Palestine). The US has reportedly handed over the keys again: “Israel now appears to be receiving munitions from the stockpile in significant quantities for use in its war on Gaza, yet there has been little transparency about transfers from the arsenal.”
What’s in the weapons stockpile? According to someone who was in charge of it, the current stockpile “is full of so-called dumb munitions (those without sophisticated guidance systems), such as…thousands of iron bombs that are simply dropped from aircraft so gravity can do its work.”
Carpet bombing
An assessment from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions Israel used in Gaza from early October through mid-December were unguided “dumb” bombs. So about 12,000–13,000 bombs.
Precision-guided munitions can feature prominently in carpet bombing campaigns just like unguided ones can, but the ODNI report helps explain why human rights groups have documented so many instances of indiscriminate attacks by Israel in Gaza. International law prohibits indiscriminate attacks, which are attacks that make no distinction between military targets and civilians.1 This includes those that aren’t directed at a specific military objective, or use weapons that can’t be directed at a specific military objective.
Israel has been using very large weapons in Gaza, including 2,000-pound bombs (which the Israeli military proudly displays on social media). Considering their blast radius (= several football fields) and how densely-populated Gaza is, Israel’s military can’t distinguish combatants from civilians when they use these munitions. In this context, pretty much any attack involving these bombs is inherently indiscriminate.2 So while the Israeli army claims it only attacks military targets, their inordinate use of large unguided munitions means they care about international law about as much as their bombs do.
^Alt text for screen readers: The Israeli military is carpet bombing Gaza. Israel dropped 29,000 bombs on Gaza. Up to 45 percent were unguided “dumb” bombs. This donut chart displays 16,000 guided bombs and 13,000 unguided bombs. Data comes from CNN and ODNI in December 2023. More at Stephen Semler dot substack dot com
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org). Follow me on Bluesky.
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The principle of distinction is a cornerstone of international humanitarian law.
I say “pretty much” because there’s a technicality, albeit one I and several others don’t find very convincing. From the Washington Post: ‘The official said the US believes that an unguided munition dropped via dive-bombing is similarly precise to a guided munition.” But this defense seems flimsy because “Even attempts to more precisely engineer the path of such missiles can’t necessarily mitigate the potential for civilian harm, according to analyses by Armament Research Services, commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross. “The predicted area in which they will fall is almost always larger than that of precision-guided equivalents,” the report said.’
Separately, a war crimes investigator called the claim that dive-bombing with dumb bombs is just as precise as guided munitions “bullshit.”