The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — Targeting Intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained by The Intercept, an online American news organisation, through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the US Air Force sent officers specialising in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November.
Since October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a US intelligence report last month. And for the first time in US history, the Joe Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recovery by special forces.
At the time the drones were revealed, Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in (Israel Defence Forces) target development.”
“I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said President Biden three days after the Hamas attack.
But several weeks later, on November 21, the US Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts, quoted by The Intercept, say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting.
“They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterisation of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localised radar coverage.”
The deployment guidelines were issued by the Pentagon’s Air Force component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central, on November 21. The document provides deployment instructions to air personnel sent to the country, including an “Air Defence Liaison Team” as well as “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO).”
Intelligence engagement officers, Cline explained, coordinate intelligence between the US and partner militaries. When deployed in Iraq, Cline, who now works as an instructor for the Defence Department Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, recalled that he and other IEOs comprised a small team who spent “probably three quarters of our time working with the Iraqis, the other quarter checking in with headquarters,” adding that “it was sort of half and half a liaison and advising.”
Asked about the airmen’s mission, the Defence Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Air Forces Central, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor Central Command responded to requests for comment, The Intercept said.
The intelligence engagement process provides a low-profile mechanism through which the US can coordinate with the Israeli military, a valuable tool amid the political sensitivity of the conflict.
A US Army primer defines intelligence engagement as a “powerful” tool that is useful “especially when US policy might restrict our interaction,” as it “often does not require large budgets or footprints.” Experts say that may be the case here.
Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, a website specialising in national security law, said that there seems to be an “Israel exception” to the US rules around military assistance.
Past presidents have issued several executive orders banning the US government from carrying out or sponsoring assassinations abroad. This ban has been interpreted to include wartime targeting of civilians, according to a recent Foreign Affairs by Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group.
And the so-called Leahy law, a set of budget amendments named for Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the US government to vet foreign military units for “gross violations of human rights” when providing training or aid to those units.
Several progressive members of Congress have raised concerns that US aid to Israel — both before and during the present war — violates that requirement. “For air advisory missions, which I imagine involve intelligence sharing and training, specific domestic legal restrictions such as the Leahy law and the assassination ban would likely come into play,” McBrien said.
But the Leahy vetting process is “reversed” for Israel; rather than vetting Israeli military units beforehand, the US State Department sends aid and then waits for reports of violations, according to a recent article by Josh Paul, who resigned from his post as a State Department political-military officer over his concerns with US support for Israel.
“As a general matter, US officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Finucane was quoted by The Intercept as saying. He emphasised that the same principle applies to weapons transfers and intelligence sharing.
The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine. Targets are generated using an artificial intelligence system known as “Habsora,” Hebrew for “gospel.”
“Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military intelligence source told +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to conceal the nature of its support for the Israeli military. The Pentagon quietly tapped a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate weapons assistance to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported. The administration has also declined to reveal which weapons systems it’s providing Israel and at which quantities, insisting that the secrecy is necessary for security reasons.
“We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a press briefing in October.
