President Joe Biden’s administration is violating U.S. law that blocks aid to foreign militaries credibly accused of committing human rights abuses, according to a federal lawsuit from a group of Palestinians in Gaza and their American families.
A lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday marks the first time that victims are alleging the government’s “calculated failure” to follow the so-called Leahy Law, a decades-old statute that prohibits taxpayer-funded weapons and aid towards foreign militaries implicated in human rights abuses.
Former State Department officials who navigated Leahy Law requirements helped draft the lawsuit.
The complaint outlines how the State Department and Secretary Antony Blinken allegedly created barriers on Israel’s behalf to evade the law and urges the courts to intervene to enforce it.
Palestinians and their families, represented by civil rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now, argued that the State Department created a set of “unique, insurmountable processes to evade the Leahy Law requirement to sanction abusive Israeli units, despite overwhelming evidence of their human rights violations.”
“These violations include 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,” according to DAWN.
Plaintiffs are seeking “one thing and one thing only: for the State Department to obey the law requiring a ban on assistance to abusive Israeli security forces,” according to DAWN director Sarah Leah Whitson.”
“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,” she added. “As a result, millions of Palestinians have suffered unimaginable, horrific abuses by Israeli forces using U.S. weapons.”
Former state department official Josh Paul, among the first administration officials who publicly resigned as the U.S. continued to funnel arms to Israel in its assault in Gaza, said that “it shouldn’t take a lawsuit to get the U.S. government to obey its own laws.”
“But it was quite clear from my own experience … that the political pressure we faced not to conform with either the spirit or the letter of the law was never going to be overcome from the inside,” Paul said.
Stephen Rickard, another former state department official who monitored implementation of the Leahy Law when he was a congressional aide, said if the administration refuses to comply with the law, “then it is time for the courts to vindicate the rule of law and order it to do so.”
An investigation from The Independent revealed that the Biden administration rejected or ignored pleas to use its leverage to persuade Israel — which has received billions of dollars in U.S. military support — to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to prevent famine.
Administration officials provided diplomatic cover for Israel to create the conditions for famine by blocking international aid efforts and attempts to alleviate the crisis, making the delivery of aid almost impossible, The Independent found.
In December, a sweeping report from Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, following similar findings by international aid groups tracking allegations of human rights abuses in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court at the United Nations has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, as well as Hamas’ military chief, as Israel’s war against the group entered its 13th month.
Investigators believe Netanyahu is using “starvation as a method of warfare” by restricting aid into the region and has intentionally targeted civilians in its campaign against Hamas.
More than 45,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to Hamas’s health authorities, which have said more than half of all those killed include women and children.
In January, a federal judge rejected an unprecedented lawsuit from a group of Palestinian families and aid groups accusing the president of complicity in genocide.
But the judge’s ruling issued a warning that Biden must reflect on his “unflagging” support for Israel, and that “it is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”
