A US-made precision-guided bomb that homes in on specific targets and, ideally, limits civilian casualties, has been used in airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians, including women and children.
The weapon, the GBU-39, or small diameter bomb, was used in an attack on a former United Nations school on Thursday and in an attack on May 26 in Rafah. In both cases, the Israeli military defended its actions, saying the strikes were aimed at militants using civilians as human shields. Gaza health authorities said civilians were also killed, with videos and photos of women and children among the dead.
Two weapons experts told The New York Times that Israel appears to have increased its use of the bombs since the beginning of this year, compared with the early days of the war when it launched them in only 10 percent of airstrikes against Gaza. As a recent wave of Israeli raids shows, even a relatively small bomb can cause serious civilian casualties.
“The thing is, even using a smaller weapon, or using a precision-guided weapon, doesn’t mean you’re not killing civilians, and it doesn’t mean all of your strikes are suddenly legal,” Brian Castner said. arms specialist at Amnesty International.
Early in the war, the Israeli military launched full-scale incursions into Gaza cities with tanks, artillery and 2,000-pound bombs, earning international condemnation for heavy civilian casualties.
Under the push of the Biden administration, analysts said, Israel has shifted its combat strategy toward low-intensity operations and targeted strikes and is now relying more on the GBU-39. The bomb weighs 250 pounds, including 37 pounds of explosives, and is dropped from warplanes.
Ryan Brobst, a military analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said the change appeared to begin in January or February and “probably explains the change in the ammunition being used.”
Last month, an unexploded GBU-39 was found at a school in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, and the distinctive rear wing of the same type of bomb was seen at the scene of a May 13 strike further south at a family home and school in Nuseirat that killed up to 30.
And remnants of GBU-39s turned up outside homes hit by deadly Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in April, an undisclosed location in Gaza in March and Tal-Al Sultan in January, analysts said.
These examples of Israeli use of GBU-39s represent only a fraction of the expert estimates that, in total, there were at least tens of thousands of airstrikes with a variety of weapons. But the debris found after the airstrikes and requests to replenish Israel’s stockpiles signal that Israel has clearly stepped up its use of GBU-39s, several analysts said.
“We’ve been seeing a lot more GBU-39 scrap in recent months,” Mr. Castner said. “The trend was from largest to smallest.” (However, he said, Amnesty researchers continue to see evidence of large munitions such as the Mark-80 series, which weigh up to 2,000 pounds and were fired into populated areas early in the war.)
Only the Israeli military has an accurate list of how often and where it has used GBU-39s since the war began in October, after Hamas fighters killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, Israel says. Israeli military officials did not respond to questions about the weapon in Gaza, but said in a written statement to The New York Times on Thursday that “when the type of target and operational conditions permit, the IDF prefers to use lighter ammunition.”
The statement went on to say: “Ammunition selected by the IDF is selected in a way that matches the type of ammunition to the specific target, with the aim of achieving the military objective, taking into account the environment and mitigating harm to the civilian population as much as possible.” more”.
During the first six weeks of the war, Israel regularly dropped 2,000-pound bombs on southern Gaza, where civilians had been told to move for their safety. The impacts reduced apartment buildings to huge craters and killed thousands of people, according to a Times investigation in December.
In November, US officials urged Israel to use smaller bombs to better protect civilians. Just a month earlier, GBU-39 maker Boeing Corp. had expedited delivery of 1,000 weapons from a 2021 order that had not yet been completed.
By December, President Biden was warning Israel that it was losing global support for the war because of “the indiscriminate bombing that’s going on.”
“We have made it clear to the Israelis, and they know, that the safety of innocent Palestinians remains of great concern,” Mr. Biden said on Dec. 12. “And so the actions they take must be consistent with trying to do everything possible to prevent innocent Palestinian civilians from being hurt, murdered, killed, lost.”
But even the smaller bombs have caused collateral damage.
The first known use of GBU-39s in the current war was on Oct. 24 in Khan Younis, where two family homes were hit by four of the bombs, an expert said.
In January, Israel struck the top two floors of a five-story residential building in Rafah shortly before 11 p.m. It killed 18 civilians, including four women and 10 children, according to an Amnesty International investigation that concluded the bomb used in the strike was a GBU-39. It was one of the examples gathered in April by Amnesty International of the possible illegal use of US-made weapons in Israel, starting in January 2023.
The State Department concluded in May that Israel likely violated humanitarian standards by failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but said it found no specific cases that would justify suspending US military aid.
Current and former U.S. officials said Israel generally does not share information about the use of GBU-39s with Washington, and a State Department system set up in August to track civilian deaths from U.S. weapons in foreign conflicts has struggled to compile a comprehensive list. A US official said the May 26 airstrike in Rafah was being investigated as part of the new process to determine whether humanitarian laws were violated by the US’s use of weapons.
Israel has deployed the GBU-39 since 2008, using them in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. The bombs have a range of at least 40 miles and are guided by GPS with coordinates for specific targets set before the weapons are launched. Experts say the GBU-39 is so accurate that it can hit specific rooms inside buildings.
The United States has delivered at least 9,550 GBU-39s to Israel since 2012, including 1,000 sent last fall under the fast-track order, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors arms transfers. Mr Brobst, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said more had probably been sent since then.
Most strike aircraft can carry eight GBU-39s at a time, and each can be independently guided to various targets. That makes them an effective weapon for the Israeli military, said NR Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services.
In terms of limiting civilian casualties, however, “it’s not a panacea,” Mr. Jenzen-Jones said. “It may be small compared to other aerial bombs, but the small-diameter bomb still packs a significant punch.”
Myra Noveck contributed to the report from Jerusalem and Eric Schmidt from Washington.
