Dept of state:

QUESTION: Matt, just something that you said at the beginning, I think, of the briefing to Kylie. She was asking specifically about potential IHL (international humanitarian law) violations in terms of Israel’s strikes in Lebanon. And you said with respect to Gaza – I mean, she asked about that later; but before, you said a limited number of people available to perform those assessments, especially when you look at the number of incidents that’s been reported in Gaza. So are you – we will ask you about these potential IHL violations of Israeli offensive since beginning of Gaza war. Are you suggesting that U.S. hasn’t been able to conclude these assessments because you’re short of personnel?

MR MILLER: No. Not in any way. Only that it takes us longer to conclude those assessments because of the number of personnel that we have available to conduct them and the very high number of incidents that we’re having to look at. If you look at the National Security Memorandum which we released – I think it was in April – it made clear there that we were looking at a very high number of incidents. And it is an extremely intensive process to look at incidents, to try and gather facts and apply those facts versus the law. And we have a lot of them to look at. And Congress doesn’t give us any additional funding to look at those. We of course welcome it. But no, only that we have a lot of incidents so it takes time to work through all of them.

QUESTION: Right. And in terms of the process we’re talking about, are we talking about an atrocities determination? What kind of process are we talking about?

MR MILLER: I’m not going to get into our – we’ve said a number of times, and it remains true, that we have a number of different assessments underway looking at individual – potential – potential individual violations of international humanitarian law, but I’m not going to get into the details of it.

QUESTION: Do you think you’re going to be able to conclude them either way before the administration hands over to the next administration?

MR MILLER: So there have been – I’ve said this – I’ve made this clear before. There have been some that we have concluded already because you can always – like, look, you know how it is, like, think about any kind of investigative process. You get some incidents, and right away the ones that clearly don’t rise to the level of merit and further investigation, you can close those out and move along. And we have been able to look at a number of things and close those out and move along. That’s been true going back months and I’ve made that clear before. With respect to the other ones, I can’t give you a timetable other than to say that we want to finish the work as soon as possible.

QUESTION: Are you at all able to say at least how many you haven’t been able to close off and move on?

MR MILLER: I’m not. I’m not.