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democracy for the arab world now
Lawsuit Claims State Department Illegally Arming Israel via Leahy Law 'Loophole'
"This lawsuit demands one thing and one thing only: for the State Department to obey the law requiring a ban on assistance to abusive Israeli security forces," said one advocate.
Dec 17, 2024
Palestinians and Palestinian Americans on Tuesday filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. State Department of creating a "loophole" allowing Israel to skirt federal legislation barring American military aid to foreign militaries that violate human rights law.
The lawsuit, which was filed by five individuals and supported by the group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), accuses the State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken of violating the Leahy Law, legislation passed in two parts in the late 1990s that built on the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961's proscription of U.S. military aid to foreign security forces that commit gross human rights violations.
According to DAWN, the suit "documents how the State Department has created unique, insurmountable processes to evade the Leahy Law requirement to sanction abusive Israeli units, despite overwhelming evidence of their human rights violations" including "torture, prolonged detention without charge, forced disappearance, and flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, and security, such as genocide, indiscriminate and deliberate killings, and deprivation of items essential to survival, including food, water, fuel, and medicine."
Case plaintiff Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American from the southern Gazan city of Rafah who has lost numerous relatives in Israeli attacks, toldZeteo's Prem Thakker, "I'm hoping, through this action, through this lawsuit, that we can just call out the federal government to begin to enforce American laws."
The State Department has sparked international outrage by repeatedly finding that Israel is using U.S.-supplied arms in compliance with domestic human rights law, citing the key ally's right to defend itself and the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack. However, Israel's 438-day retaliation has left more than 162,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Thousands more have been killed or maimed in the West Bank.
South Africa is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Last month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Both men have been warmly welcomed in Washington, D.C.. Congress and the Biden administration have approved tens of billions of dollars in arms transfers to Israel. U.S.-supplied bombs have been used in some of Israel's most notorious airstrikes. The U.S. has also vetoed numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a Gaza cease-fire.
Today, the White House welcomed Yoav Gallant, charged by the ICC with the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. What a disgrace.
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— Adil Haque ( @adhaque.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 12:21 PM
"This lawsuit demands one thing and one thing only: for the State Department to obey the law requiring a ban on assistance to abusive Israeli security forces," DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement on Tuesday. "For too long, the State Department has acted as if there's an 'Israel exemption' from the Leahy Law, despite the fact that Congress required it to apply the law to every country in the world. As a result, millions of Palestinians have suffered unimaginable, horrific abuses by Israeli forces using U.S. weapons."
Stephen Rickard, a former U.S. official who helped pass the landmark legislation, said that "long-standing concerns that the State Department was not cutting off aid to specific Israel units as required by the Leahy Law... have been given dramatic urgency by the tragic ongoing crisis in Gaza."
"If the State Department will not comply with the law, then it is time for the courts to vindicate the rule of law and order it to do so," Rickard added.
The new lawsuit came a day after relatives of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi—the Turkish American woman who, according to witnesses, was deliberately shot in the head while peacefully protesting the expansion of Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank in September—met with Blinken in search of justice and accountability for the activist's killing.
Referring to another American activist killed by Israeli forces while defending Palestinian homes, Hamid Ali, Eygi's widower, said that Blinken "was attentive in listening to us, but unfortunately repeated a lot of the same things that we've been hearing for the past 20 years, particularly since Rachel Corrie's killing."
Ali called Blinken "very deferential to the Israelis," adding that "it felt like he was saying his hands were tied and they weren't able to really do much."
A journalist asked State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller during a Tuesday press conference why the U.S. has not suspended arms transfers to Israel by invoking the Leahy Law and citing the cases of victims like Eygi or Shireen Abu Akleh—the Palestinian American Al Jazeera correspondent who, according to witnesses and several independent probes, was deliberately shot dead by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank in May 2022.
"We have taken those cases extremely seriously," Miller claimed. Referring to Eygi, he added that he made it clear to Israel that "her death was unacceptable, that it should have been avoided, it should have never happened in the first place, that we want to see the results of their investigation, and we want to see them change their rules of engagement."
In October, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin threatened to cut off weapons to Israel if it did not dramatically improve human rights conditions in Gaza within 30 days. Thirty days came and went with no discernible improvements, yet the arms flow continued.
On Tuesday, 20 progressive lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives led by Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Greg Casar (D-Texas) sent Blinken and Austin a letter arguing that "the United States government must suspend offensive weapons" shipments to Israel due to its violation of federal and international law.
"U.S. law is clear: If the Netanyahu government does not allow sufficient food and medicine to enter Gaza, then the U.S. cannot send weapons," Casar wrote on social media.
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Global Fury After State Dept Claims Israel Not Violating US Law by Blocking Gaza Aid
"This will be the Biden administration's legacy: unconditional support for war crimes and complicity in genocide," said one group.
Nov 12, 2024
Human rights advocates around the world reacted angrily to Tuesday's U.S. State Department determination that Israel is not violating humanitarian law—even as its forces annihilate Gaza and block aid from entering the embattled Palestinian enclave.
Last month, the Biden administration—which has approved tens of billions of dollars in military aid for Israel and provided nearly unconditional diplomatic support since October 2023—sent a letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off U.S. arms transfers if it failed to take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.
Asked during a Tuesday press conference if the Israeli government has met the letter's demands, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that "we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law."
"The overall humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to be unsatisfactory," Patel continued. "But in the context of the letter, it's not about whether we find something satisfactory or not; it's what are the actions that we're seeing."
"These actions that we have seen, we think that these are steps in the right direction," he added, citing the limited reopening of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. "We want to see more steps. We want to see these steps sustained over a significant period of time, and ultimately, we want to see these steps have a result on the situation."
Patel insisted that the Biden administration is "not giving Israel a pass."
However, humanitarian aid groups accuse Israel of causing " apocalyptic" conditions in northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians including many women and children have been killed or wounded while others face imminent famine under a plan to starve out the population in order to ethnically cleanse the area.
On Tuesday, a coalition of eight international humanitarian groups including Oxfam International, CARE, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and others published a report titled The Gaza Scorecard: Israel Fails to Comply With U.S. Humanitarian Access Demands in Gaza, which found that Israel has failed to fully comply with any of the 19 specific demands in the Biden administration's letter.
The scorecard noted:
The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that "the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence." The findings of this scorecard underscore Israel's failure to comply with U.S. demands and international obligations. Israel should be held accountable for the end result of failing to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical, and other supplies to reach people in need.
"While Israel manipulates the U.S. by allowing some aid trucks into other parts of Gaza in the days leading up to the deadline, the performative act did not bring any humanitarian aid to the besieged northern neighborhoods of Gaza," said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). "Even more concerning, no forcibly displaced Palestinian from the northern neighborhoods of Gaza has been allowed to return home."
Indeed, the IDF said it has "no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes."
At the same time, relief workers describe deadly dangers faced by Palestinians who try to flee besieged areas including the Jabalia refugee camp, site of some of the war's worst massacres, including indiscriminate Israeli targeting of refugees without regard for age or gender.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague is in the lengthy process of determining if Israel's atrocities amount to violations of the Genocide Convention. While it is weighing the evidence in the South Africa-led case, the ICJ has issued a series of provisional orders directing Israel to prevent genocidal acts, halt its assault on Rafah, and stop blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Critics accuse Israel of flouting all three orders.
"As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. is obligated to prevent acts of genocide and to avoid complicity in them," DAWN stressed on Tuesday. "The U.S. should halt its military support for Israel to comply with its convention obligations and uphold international legal norms."
This is not the first time that the Biden administration has officially denied that Israel has violated humanitarian law during the Gaza war. In March, the State Department accepted Israel's assertion that the country is using U.S.-supplied arms in compliance with international law, even as more than 100,000 Palestinians had been killed or wounded in Gaza up to that date. The casualty figure has since increased by about 50%.
Congressional progressives and human rights groups pushed back on the Biden administration's claim. In April, a leaked memo revealed that officials at the United States Agency for International Development warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel was indeed breaking the law by blocking aid from entering Gaza. Another leaked State Department memo raised "serious concern" over Israeli noncompliance with humanitarian law and slammed Israel's claims of legal U.S. weapons use as "neither credible nor reliable."
Palestine advocates fear the Biden administration's refusal to suspend arms shipments to Israel—as experts argue is required under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws—will open the door for Republican President-elect Donald Trump to back Israeli crimes such as the annexation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank.
"By spending over a year ignoring U.S. law on supplying arms, the Biden administration has handed Trump an excuse to ignore any law he wants," Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss said Tuesday on social media. "And they will have nothing to say about it."
Duss called the Biden administration's new determination "predictable, pathetic, and blatantly illegal."
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Sanders Pledges Resolution to Block $20 Billion US Arms Sale to Israel
"There will be another shipment of military weapons and planes that has to come before Congress to get an approval, and I will lead the effort to try to stop that," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Aug 30, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders pledged Thursday to introduce a resolution to block the Biden administration's proposed $20 billion sale of additional U.S. weaponry to Israel, telling an audience in his home state of Vermont that he will "lead the effort to make sure that we do not give any more arms to Israel unless there's a radical change in politics."
"There will be another shipment of military weapons and planes that has to come before Congress to get an approval, and I will lead the effort to try to stop that," Sanders told Vermonters gathered at the Brattleboro Senior Center for an annual event hosted by the Independent senator's office.
Sanders, who called in to the event, has been an outspoken opponent of the Biden administration's continued transfer of offensive weapons to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used American arms to target Palestinian civilians and humanitarian aid operations in violation of both U.S. and international law.
BREAKING — @SenSanders has committed to introduce a Joint Resolution of Disapproval to block new $20B weapons sale to Israel. Activists secured this commitment at the senior center in Brattleboro, VT on Thursday. @NSC_Spox pic.twitter.com/8ovxQ1OKTo
— Action Corps (@theactioncorps) August 30, 2024
The U.S. State Department notified Congress on August 13 that it decided to approve the sale of dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tens of thousands of mortar shells, and other weaponry to Israel. Some of the military equipment isn't set to be delivered until 2026.
According toThe New York Times, the Biden administration deliberately timed the notification for when both chambers of Congress were on recess in an effort to "avoid an ugly fight" over the sales.
Sanders' vow to introduce a resolution of disapproval could throw a wrench in the administration's plans for a smooth congressional review process.
As the advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) explained earlier this month, the "only mechanism available to Congress to prevent this sale from advancing is a Joint Resolution of Disapproval (JRD)."
While the Biden administration is likely to argue that the 15-day period for lawmakers to challenge the proposed sale has passed, DAWN observed that "the Senate parliamentarian has previously ruled that the Senate can consider these cases even after the 15-day clock has expired."
Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN's executive director, applauded Sanders late Thursday for "challenging this reckless provision of weapons to Israel."
"The whole world can see that Israel has massacred over 40,000 Gazans with U.S. weapons and has no intention of stopping the carnage," Whitson wrote on social media. "Just over a week ago, DAWN urged the Senate to pause and question this massive weapons sale, which is fueling not only the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza but a wider regional war."
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