A group of Palestinians filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department over its military aid to Israel.
The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. is circumventing human rights laws that say it cannot provide aid to militaries accused of human rights abuses. According to the filing, the Palestinians are “seeking declaratory and injunctive relief based on Defendant’s de facto refusal to implement the statute prohibiting U.S. assistance to Israeli security force units about which there is credible information that they have committed gross violations of human rights.”
Under the “Leahy Law,” the U.S. government is prohibited from “using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director for Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a legal nonprofit group supporting the lawsuit, said the 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.”
“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,” Whitson said.
In April, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “Do we have a double standard? The answer is no.”
“When it comes to allegations of incidents of – whether it’s violations of international humanitarian law, rights abuses, you name it, we have processes within the department that are looking at incidents that have been raised,” he added. “Those processes are ongoing. And here, again, it’s important that we take the time to do our best to get the facts, to get the information, to do the analysis. It’s very challenging to do this in real time. And most – as you’ll see if you look back at other places where we’ve made determinations ourselves, it usually takes time to do that to get the – to get the information.”
