“My name is Josh Paul.” Thus begins a letter that is kept today by the international officials of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and that tomorrow could become new proof of the invaluable collaboration of the US Government with the genocide perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
Paul had, as they say, “his life together.” This US Administration official enjoyed a good position in the Political Military Office of the Department of Statedefined by other officials who passed by there as a “little Pentagon and CIA.”
In October 2023, as Israeli troops began to raze the Gaza Strip, Paul submitted his resignation as parliamentary affairs officer in that office. Despite all the comforts derived from his position, he considered that I shouldn’t have been an accomplice of the policy followed by the Government of Joe Biden in Gaza.
The former State Department official took his complaints to the TCA, an international agreement signed by the US in 2013 and that the Senate of that country never ratified. The treaty establishes that its signatories will not authorize “no transfer of conventional arms” to those countries where “they could be used to commit genocide.
As you have been able to verify PublicPaul submitted his letter to the ATT Sub-Working Group on Current and Emerging Implementation Issues on the eve of the International Conference of States Parties which took place last August in Geneva.
In the document to which this newspaper has had access, the former official points out that “the United States is, by far, the main arms supplier to Israelto which it supplies, through subsidies and sales and through both commercial and government-to-government channels, weapons worth many billions of dollars“, including lethal material that “has been used in the current israeli war against Gaza”.
According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 69% of Israel’s weapons imports in 2023 they came from the United States.
The attacks ordered by the Netanyahu Government have already accumulated more than 42,000 deaths
For its part, Amnesty International has identified the use in Gaza of munitions, including joint direct attack munitions, small diameter GBU-39 bombs and US-made components by Israeli forces. The attacks ordered by the Benjamin Netanyahu’s government they accumulate already more than 42,000 murdered, mostly women and children. In Lebanon there are another 2,000 dead.
Indiscriminate bombings
The former member of the Biden Administration told the TCA that the White House “has actual knowledge that these weapons are being used to commit crimes.” human rights violations” both in West Bank as in Gazawhere “they have been used to carry out extrajudicial executions.”
He also assured that the US had sent Israel “air-to-ground ammunition, artillery shells and tank shells, which have been used, in the words of President Biden, to carry out indiscriminate bombings“.
Paul remarked that he knew exactly what he was talking about. “I can safely say that the United States has actual knowledge that its weapons will be used to commit such violations, since I have been part of the internal debates of the US Government for many years, and I myself raised these specific concerns after the start of the Israel attack on Gaza before my resignation” in October 2023, Paul said.
The former State Department official denounced that the United States is violating its own policies and laws, including the conventional arms transfer policy that Paul himself helped write and that it “was intentionally based on the Arms Trade Treaty, which expressly prohibits the transfer of arms when they are more likely to be used to commit certain human rights violations.
Paul urged the US Government to “assume your responsibilities as a signatory of Arms Trade Treaty, awaiting its ratification”, so that “do not undermine the objectives” of that international agreement and, therefore, “suspend transfers of lethal weapons to Israel that could be used by this country in the occupied Palestinian territories.
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