US to hold talks with Israeli officials over civilian casualties in Gaza

Senior US and Israeli officials will meet in early December to address American concerns over harm to civilians caused by Israel's brutal military operations in Gaza, the State Department said on Tuesday.

The United States has sporadically voiced concerns to ally Israel over the civilian death toll in Gaza, however, American-supplied weapons have often been used in strikes that have killed Palestinians throughout the war.

However, it has only once exercised the ultimate US leverage - holding some of the billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.

The State Department has also opened several investigations into Israeli strikes using US-supplied weapons that killed Gaza civilians. But no conclusions have been made public, and US military aid has continued to flow.

The December meeting will be the first of a new channel designed to "inform the ongoing work that the State Department has to do to make assessments about the use of US-provided weapons," spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Israel's use of the weapons would breach US law if it were determined the country had deliberately targeted and killed civilians, and US authorities are looking at specific instances to see whether that is the case.

"There are a number of incidents that we have had questions about and we've had concerns about," Miller said.

He added that "we set up this new channel because we wanted to formalise a mechanism for getting answers to some of these questions."

Miller declined to specify where the meeting would take place.

The Biden administration has long called for such a channel, which was included in a letter Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent to Israel in mid-October.

The letter additionally gave Israel a month to allow more assistance into Gaza or face cutoffs of some US weapons.

However the United States ultimately decided not to take action, despite Israel not meeting metrics on the number of aid trucks and a new UN-backed assessment warning of imminent famine in Gaza.

Earlier Tuesday, a handful of left-leaning senators called on the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, accusing the United States of playing a key role in the "atrocities" of the war in Gaza.

The health ministry in Gaza says Israeli forces have killed at least 43,972 people since the start of the war on October 7 last year. Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip have been described as genocide by leading NGOs, world leaders and UN agencies.