Washington (QNN)- The US reportedly obtained intelligence last year indicating that Israeli military lawyers had warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel during the US-backed genocide in Gaza. According to a Reuters report, citing former US officials, the material was not broadly circulated within the US government until late in the Biden administration, when it was disseminated more widely ahead of a congressional briefing in December 2024. There were concerns Israel was intentionally targeting civilians and humanitarian workers, a potential war crime confirmed by several human rights groups and investigations. US officials expressed alarm at the findings, particularly as the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza raised concerns that Israel’s attacks might breach international legal standards on acceptable collateral damage. Israel has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians during the two-year genocide in Gaza, accoring to the Palestinija Health Minsitry. The US finding that Israel was committing war crimes would have required, under US law, blocking future arms shipments and ending intelligence sharing with Israel. Biden was also briefed on the matter by his national security advisers. The American debate about whether the Israelis had committed war crimes in Gaza ended when lawyers from across the US government determined that it was still legal for the US to continue supporting Israel with weapons and intelligence because the US had not gathered its own evidence that Israel was violating the law of armed conflict and had intentionally killed civilians and humanitarians or blocked aid, according to three former US officials. President Trump and his officials were briefed by Biden’s team on the intelligence but showed little interest in the subject after they took over in January and began siding more powerfully with the Israelis, said former US officials. Even before the U.S. gathered war crimes intelligence from within the Israeli military, some lawyers at the State Department, which oversees legal assessments of foreign military conduct, repeatedly raised concerns with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes, according to five former US officials. As early as December 2023, lawyers from the State Department's legal bureau told Blinken in meetings that they believed Israel's military conduct in Gaza likely amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and potentially war crimes, two of the US officials said. "They saw their job as being justifying a political decision," one of the former US officials said. "Even when the evidence clearly pointed to war crimes, the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card was proving intent," one of the officials said. The lack of a definitive conclusion by the State Department's lawyers was largely reflected in a US government report produced during the Biden administration in May 2024, when Washington said Israel might have violated international humanitarian law using US-supplied weapons during its assault in Gaza. The report, which was prepared by the State Department, stopped short of a definitive assessment, citing the fog of war. Among the issues debated by US officials in the final weeks of the Biden administration was whether the government would be complicit if Israeli officials were to face charges in an international tribunal, said people familiar with this debate. Democratic US Senator Chris Van Hollen, a critic of Israel’s Gaza genocide, its blockade on aid, and US support for the assault, said the Reuters report underscored “a pattern of deliberate blindness on behalf of the Biden administration with respect to the use and abuse of American weapons in Gaza.” “The Biden administration deliberately looked the other way in the face of overwhelming evidence that war crimes were being committed with U.S. weapons in Gaza,” Van Hollen, of Maryland, told Reuters. A UN Commission of Inquiry report and several rights groups, including Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, have confirmed that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Recent reports, released by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, found that: without US weapons and money, Israel wouldn’t have been able to sustain its genocidal war on Gaza.