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democracy for the arab world now
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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DOJ Urged to Provide Update on Probe of Shireen Abu Akleh's Killing
DAWN's leader slammed the department's "apparent failure to make progress on this investigation, which has fueled Israeli impunity, leading to the systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian journalists."
Jul 29, 2024
An advocacy group founded by an assassinated journalist demanded answers from the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday regarding its investigation of Israeli troops killing American Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022.
"Perhaps the DOJ thinks we will forget about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh as well as the investigation it promised the American people two years ago, but we have not," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), in a statement.
"The DOJ should take responsibility for its apparent failure to make progress on this investigation, which has fueled Israeli impunity, leading to the systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian journalists, at least 108 since Abu-Akleh's 2022 killing."
"Without an interim update on the investigation or a concluding report, it is hard to take seriously U.S. claims that it will vigorously investigate and hold accountable extrajudicial killings of American citizens."
Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank, according to firsthand accounts and various investigations that have been made public. The 51-year-old Al Jazeera journalist was wearing a blue press vest and helmet.
"A beloved and prominent figure in the region, Abu Akleh's killing not only led to prolonged unrest in the West Bank but also became emblematic of Israel's use of lethal force to intimidate and kill journalists," DAWN leaders wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray.
As the letter—signed by Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, DAWN's director of research for Israel-Palestine—detailed:
Since the launch of the DOJ investigation, you have not made any information available regarding the nature, scope, and timeline of the probe into the killing of an American citizen by a foreign army, despite prior comments by then State Department spokesperson Ned Price that "those responsible for Shireen's killing should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Regrettably, more recent statements coming from U.S. authorities imply that the administration has pushed the investigation to the wayside. At a news briefing on World Press Freedom Day, a State Department spokesperson insisted that Shireen's murder was "unintentional" despite credible reports to the contrary and noted that the U.S. had no further updates on the case.
Some critics have connected Abu Akleh's killing to what the Committee to Protect Journalists last year called a "deadly, decadeslong pattern" by the IDF—which, has slaughtered over 100 journalists and tens of thousands of other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in Israeli forces' ongoing retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on Israel last October.
"The impunity that Israel has enjoyed for its attacks on the press, including for the murder of Abu Akleh, has made Israeli officials confident that they can kill as many Palestinian journalists as they want with no accountability," DAWN leadership wrote to the DOJ. "Israel's failure to identify the perpetrators, open a criminal investigation, and to cooperate with external investigations further compounds Israel's impunity in targeting journalists in the region."
The letter calls for the DOJ to provide a "timely response" to a series of questions about the department's investigatory steps, Israeli cooperation or lack thereof, and which specific U.S. criminal laws are being considered for the probe.
Schaeffer Omer-Man said that "without an interim update on the investigation or a concluding report, it is hard to take seriously U.S. claims that it will vigorously investigate and hold accountable extrajudicial killings of American citizens."
"The lack of communicable progress also adds to the grief felt by the Abu Akleh family, who filed a formal complaint with the ICC in May 2022 about Abu Akleh's killing by IDF forces," he added, referring to the International Criminal Court.
DAWN was founded by the late Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and U.S. resident who—according to multiple investigations—was murdered at his home country's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2, 2018. As Common Dreamsreported on the fifth anniversary of his assassination last year, human rights advocates continue to condemn the failure of international officials to hold accountable the people responsible for his death.
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