A group of Palestinians in Palestine and the U.S. have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, accusing officials of breaking domestic law by continuing to send Israel weapons despite numerous “gross violations” of human rights in the past year in Gaza and for decades beforehand.
The lawsuit was filed by five Palestinians who have lost family or face threats due to the U.S.’s weapons transfers to Israel. The lead plaintiff, under pseudonym Amal Gaza, is a teacher in Gaza who has lost 20 of her family members in the genocide and has been forcibly displaced by Israel seven times since October 2023.
Also among the plaintiffs is the executive director of Al-Haq, a West Bank human rights group, and Palestinian Americans who have lost numerous family members or risk losing family due to the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza.
The lawsuit says that the plaintiffs’ fear over the threats to their families would be diminished if the U.S. adhered to the Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. from sending assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights violations.
“The State Department’s calculated failure to apply the Leahy Law is particularly shocking in the face of the unprecedented escalation of Israeli [gross violations of human rights] since the Gaza War erupted on October 7, 2023,” the lawsuit says.
It goes on to list numerous allegations of human rights violations from sources like the International Court of Justice and UN experts, saying, “Despite this overwhelming record of [gross violations of human rights] committed by Israel’s security forces, the State Department has irresponsibly embraced, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’ in contempt of the Leahy Law.”
“If the State Department had done its job and sanctioned U.S.-funded Israeli military units for arbitrarily detaining Palestinians for years without evidence or charge based on secret evidence, including myself, it could have prevented my suffering in prison and deprivation of liberty,” said Shawan Jabarin, the head of Al-Haq. Israeli forces have imprisoned Jabarin on no charges for six years and continue to restrict his movements.
“Instead, I continue to live in fear of imminent harm by abusive, U.S.-funded Israeli units who know that they can get away with anything because the State Department will ignore the U.S. law prohibiting aid to them,” Jabarin said.
The lawsuit is backed and advised by numerous former State Department and other U.S. government officials, including former Leahy Law vetter Josh Paul and Tim Rieser, a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), after whom the legislation is named, who helped draft the legislation.
“Despite years of credible reports of gross violations of human rights by Israeli defense and police units, including in the State Department’s own annual Human Rights Reports, as far as we are aware not a single unit has been denied U.S. aid under the Leahy Law,” said Rieser. “[The senator] repeatedly made the point that the Leahy Law applies equally to all countries that receive U.S.aid. While the State Department claims that to be the case, the facts show otherwise.”
It’s also backed by U.S.-based human rights group DAWN, which notes that, if the Leahy Law were implemented, “most, if not all, of Israeli security force units would be found ineligible for U.S. military assistance in light of the vast scale of Israeli security force abuses,” especially in Gaza.
The lawsuit highlights how the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF), as experts have said, is not designed to determine whether or not Israeli units are eligible to receive assistance under U.S. law, but rather to give the Israeli military a pass no matter the violations they allegedly commit.
“The ILVF operates under a unique, complex, lengthy, high-level Leahy vetting process that is arbitrary and capricious, and is not rationally related to advancing the purpose of the Leahy Law,” the lawsuit says, pointing out that the ILVF has never once deemed a unit ineligible for assistance. “On the contrary, the ILVF appears designed to frustrate the 2019 Leahy Amendment, and avoid designating any Israeli unit ineligible for military assistance.”
Advocates have long said that the U.S. is violating not just the Leahy Law, but also numerous other domestic and international laws regarding foreign military aid in sending Israel arms. Recently, Amnesty International found that Israel is indeed committing genocide, meaning that ending arms shipments to Israel would be acting in accordance with international law.
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