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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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Israel's Use of Human Shields in Gaza Sparks Calls for US Probe
"The State Department and the Department of Justice must investigate these credible charges of widespread and systematic human rights abuses," the head of one Muslim American advocacy group said.
Oct 21, 2024
The Israel Defense Forces' use of Palestinians—who are often handcuffed and forced to wear IDF uniforms—as human shields prompted the leading U.S. Muslim advocacy group on Monday to call on the Biden administration to investigate what experts say is a war crime by the No. 1 recipient of American military aid.
International law prohibits the use of combatants or civilians as human shields. However, numerous reports have emerged during Israel's yearlong assault on Gaza—which has left more than 152,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing and is the subject of an International Criminal Court genocide case led by South Africa—of IDF troops forcing captured Palestinians, including children, to protect Israeli forces in life-threatening situations.
"The State Department and the Department of Justice must investigate these credible charges of widespread and systematic human rights abuses by military forces that receive weapons paid for by American taxpayers and used against a civilian population," Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement.
"These abuses, and the obvious and open ethnic cleansing of Gaza, violate our nation's laws," Awad added. "The Biden administration's complicity with this genocide stains our national reputation and will haunt our diplomats for generations to come when they are told to 'remember Gaza' whenever they bring up the subject of human rights."
International media outlets including Al Jazeera, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Britain's The Guardian, and The New York Times have reported how Israel uses abducted Palestinian militants and civilians to proceed ahead of IDF troops in underground tunnels and buildings in order to protect their captors during life-threatening missions.
In May, a report published by Defense for Children International-Palestine revealed that Palestinian minors are forced to walk ahead of IDF soldiers during dangerous raids. Subsequent Al Jazeera reports of a Palestinian strapped to the hood of an Israeli combat vehicle to deter attack and Gazans being sent into buildings and tunnels to ensure the locations weren't rigged with explosives sparked international outrage and initial IDF denials.
"It's hard to recognize them. They're usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they're always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks," Haaretzreported in August. But upon closer examination, "you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear."
According to an Al Jazeeraarticle published Sunday:
By dressing Palestinian civilians in Israeli military uniforms and casting them as combatants the Israeli military purposefully conceals their vulnerability. It deploys them as shields not to deter Palestinian fighters from striking Israeli soldiers, but rather to draw their fire and thus reveal their location, allowing the Israeli troops to launch a counterattack and kill the fighters. The moment these human shields, masked as soldiers, are sent into the tunnels, they are transformed from vulnerable civilians into fodder.
One 35-year-old Palestinian man, who declined to be identified by his real name for fear of his life, told The Guardian that "the Israeli soldiers put a GPS tracker on my hand and told me: 'If you try to run away, we will shoot you. We will know where you are.'"
"I was asked to go to knock on the doors of four houses and two schools and ask people to leave—women and children first and then the men," he added. "At one of the schools, the situation was very dangerous. I shouted to everyone in the school to leave quietly, but at that moment there was heavy shooting by the Israeli army and I thought I was going to die."
Former IDF soldiers told The New York Times that IDF commanders instructed them that "the lives of terrorists were worth less than those of Israelis—even though officers often concluded their detainees did not belong to terrorist groups and later released them without charge."
Israel denies it uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, despite video evidence of IDF troops doing so in both Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank.
"The orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them," the IDF said in August. "The protocols and orders have been clarified to the troops on the ground."
However, IDF troops have confirmed the practice.
"From what we understand it was a very widely used protocol, meaning there are hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who have been used as human shields," former IDF sniper Nadav Weiman, who is now a director at Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans' group that exposes war crimes, toldThe Guardian.
"Palestinians are being grabbed from humanitarian corridors inside Gaza... and then they're being brought to different units inside Gaza—regular infantry units, not special forces," Weiman said. "And then those Palestinians are being used as human shields to sweep tunnels and also houses. In some cases, they have a GoPro camera on their chest or on their head and in almost all of the cases, they are cuffed before they are taken into a tunnel or house to sweep and they are dressed in IDF uniform."
The Biden administration provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and shields its ally from international accountability by wielding its United Nations Security Council veto power to block cease-fire resolutions. Administration spokespeople have deflected questions about the IDF's use of human shields by deferring to Israeli investigations in which perpetrators are rarely punished.
In 2002, the Israeli High Court of Justice issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the use of human shields in operations to quash the Second Intifada, or general uprising. Some IDF soldiers ignored the injunction, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
In 2010, two staff sergeants in the Givati Brigade were convicted of forcing a 9-year-old Palestinian boy to open bags they thought might contain explosives during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza. The staff sergeants were slapped on the wrists with suspended sentences and demotions. Neither went to prison.
Michael Schmitt, a professor of international humanitarian law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, toldThe New York Times last week that "in most cases," what Israel is accused of "constitutes a war crime."
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Senators Decry Biden's Decision to Fully Fund Egypt Despite Ongoing Rights Abuses
"Over the last year, for every single political prisoner Egypt has released, it has jailed two more," lamented U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.
Sep 12, 2024
Several Democratic U.S. senators on Thursday denounced the Biden administration's decision to send $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt despite enduring human rights abuses by the Middle Eastern country's authoritarian regime.
U.S. State Antony Blinken this week waived human rights conditions attached to $225 million of the aid package, citing Egypt's strategic importance and the country's role in attempts to broker a cease-fire agreement that would halt the assault on Gaza by Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
"It's no secret that Egypt remains a deeply repressive autocratic state."
"This decision waives requirements on an additional $225 million of military aid to Egypt that is tied to broader improvements on democracy and human rights," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) said in a statement on Thursday.
"It's no secret that Egypt remains a deeply repressive autocratic state, and I see no good reason to ignore that fact by waiving these requirements," the senator added. "We have previously withheld this portion of Egypt's military aid package, while still maintaining our strategic relationship, and we should continue to do so."
On Wednesday, Murphy and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) issued a joint statement decrying Biden's decision to fully fund Egypt, focusing on a separate $95 million share of aid released by the administration.
"The law is clear: Egypt is required to make 'clear and consistent progress' in releasing political prisoners in order to receive $95 million—a small portion—of its $1.3 billion military aid package this year," the senators wrote. "The Egyptian government has failed that test."
"Over the last year, for every single political prisoner Egypt has released, it has jailed two more," Murphy and Coons noted. "That's not clear and consistent progress—it's one step forward and two steps back. And among the thousands and thousands of political prisoners the government has continued to refuse to release are two U.S. legal permanent residents, Hosam Khalaf and Salah Soltan."
Last week, Murphy and Coons were among the nine Democratic senators and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who urged Blinken to "enforce the conditions set forth by Congress on holding Egypt accountable for progress on human rights" by withholding aid "until Egypt's human rights record improves."
According to the most recent State Department annual country report, "there were no significant changes in the human rights situation in Egypt" between 2022-23.
The report cited violations including:
Credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; transnational repression against individuals in another country; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative.
"Egypt has failed to make consistent progress, yet the State Department has decided to release additional military aid," Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said on Thursday. "The administration should use the leverage Congress provided to defend the fundamental rights of Egyptian political prisoners and dissidents. That's what the Egyptian people, and people everywhere, rightly expect of the United States."
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