Senior U.S. and Israeli officials will meet in early December to address American concerns over harm to civilians caused by military operations in Gaza, the State Department said Tuesday.

The United States has regularly voiced concerns to key ally Israel over American-supplied weapons being used in strikes that have killed civilians in the Gaza Strip.

However, it has only once exercised the ultimate U.S. leverage — holding some of the billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.

The State Department has also opened several investigations into Israeli strikes using U.S.-supplied weapons that killed Gaza civilians. But no conclusions have been made public, and U.S. military aid has continued to flow.

The December meeting will be the first of a new channel designed to "inform the ongoing work that the State Department has to do to make assessments about the use of U.S.-provided weapons," spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Israel's use of the weapons would breach U.S. law if it were determined the country had deliberately targeted and killed civilians, and U.S. authorities are looking at specific instances to see whether that is the case.

"There are a number of incidents that we have had questions about and we've had concerns about," Miller said.

"We set up this new channel because we wanted to formalize a mechanism for getting answers to some of these questions."

Miller declined to specify where the meeting would take place.

The Biden administration has long called for such a channel, which was included in a letter Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent to Israel in mid-October.

The letter additionally gave Israel a month to allow more assistance into Gaza or face cutoffs of some U.S. weapons.

However, the United States ultimately decided not to take action, despite Israel not meeting metrics on the number of aid trucks and a new U.N.-backed assessment warning of imminent famine in Gaza.

Earlier Tuesday, a handful of left-leaning senators called on the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, accusing the United States of playing a key role in the "atrocities" of the war in Gaza.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the death toll from the ongoing war has reached 43,972 people, the majority civilians. The United Nations considers the figures reliable.

The war first began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, resulting in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.