Israeli forces must “distinguish between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team emphasized on Monday amid an internal and allied backlash against Israel’s tactics in Gaza.

“It is Israel's responsibility to distinguish between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians, so we’ll continue to raise that directly with them,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said.

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Israel has drawn intense international criticism in the weeks since the Hamas terrorist attack that ignited the war in Gaza, where a devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip has sent Palestinian death tolls soaring. Israeli officials have defended their tactics by showcasing examples of Hamas placing military infrastructure in civilian areas, but Blinken signaled last week that Israel has the power “to minimize civilian casualties” in Gaza, and his aide sidestepped questions about whether Israel has complied with international law.

“We have been incredibly clear ... about the necessity of taking feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm, and we believe that that's especially true when it comes to children and refugees,” Patel said. “Hamas continues to use civilian shields, and Hamas continues to put their infrastructure and their rockets in places in civilian areas. And [Hamas has] dug tunnels deep underneath critical civilian infrastructure in Gaza that has impacted protected sites like schools and hospitals and other civilian infrastructure.”

That posture has not satisfied Israel’s critics, including dissenting U.S. diplomats who suggest that Israel has attacked civilian targets in the absence of a military justification.

“We must publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets,” a dissent memo obtained by Politico states. “When Israel supports settler violence and illegal land seizures or employs excessive use of force against Palestinians, we must communicate publicly that this goes against our American values so that Israel does not act with impunity.”

The conduct of the Israeli government and Israeli settlers in the West Bank, not part of the Gaza Strip but another Palestinian-populated region that Israel took from Jordan during the Six Day War in 1967, attracted criticism from abroad as well as within the Israeli government in recent weeks. The region, which the United Nations envisions as part of an eventual Palestinian state, has seen a flare-up of violence.

“Events on the ground indicate that under cover of war, settlers are carrying out such assaults virtually unchecked, with no one trying to stop them before, during or after the fact,” an Israeli human rights organization called B’Tselem has assessed, per the International Crisis Group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had a running dispute about settler conduct in the West Bank with national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician whom Netanyahu allowed to join the coalition government in order to secure the final votes he needed to have a governing majority. Netanyahu rejected Ben-Gvir’s “calls to grab land illegally” in the West Bank in June and reportedly clashed with the national security minister in recent days when Ben-Gvir downplayed the settler violence as mere “graffiti.”

“We continue to be incredibly concerned about what's happening in the West Bank as well, especially in the space of extremist violence,” Patel said. “We have raised those concerns directly with the Israeli government. And, we have heard from the Israeli government that they are going to make a commitment on dealing with extremist violence more effectively, and that's something that we're going to continue to pay close attention to.”

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He was less willing to discuss closed-door conversations about any gaps between Israeli military targeting and international law.

“I'm just not going to get into the specifics of these ongoing diplomatic conversations that are that are happening,” he said. “We have been incredibly clear with our Israeli partners that civilians need to be protected. That is, they need to distinguish between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians."