By Charles Blaha and Josh Paul
Charles Blaha is former Director of Security and Human Rights in the State Department who is now a Senior Advisor for DAWN. Josh Paul is a former Director of Congressional & Public Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military affairs who is now Director of A New Policy.
Background and Summary
The State Department's annual Human Rights Reports are a statutorily required product under 22 U.S.C. §2151n, 22 U.S.C. §2304, and 19 U.S.C. §2464. For decades, they have been a centerpiece of U.S. human rights reporting, covering allegations about human rights violations around the world in depth; indeed, the strongest criticism that U.S. adversaries have been able to make of the Reports, other than denying their (deeply-sourced) reporting, is that the U.S. should include itself among the countries being reported upon. The annual Human Rights Reports have been among the most widely-read U.S. government documents. (Like prior years, the Department issued the 2024 Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Report as two separate "sections" of a single Report: one section for Israel itself, the other for the West Bank and Gaza (WBG).
Many of the Department's 2024 Reports, published in August 2025, were widely met with criticism from the press, civil society, and several U.S. allies and partners with which the Trump Administration has developed discordant relations. Germany and South Africa, rejected the criticism of their countries in their respective Reports, with the South African government calling the South Africa Report "inaccurate and deeply flawed." On the other hand, the Reports glossed over violations by allies, including an assertion in the El Salvador Report that "There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses," in 2024 by the government of President Nayib Bukele, which has been President Trump's highest-profile ally in accepting deportees from the United States.
Nowhere is the problem of glossing over human rights violations by allies more clear than in the 2024 Israel/WBG Report.
Israel's unprecedented human rights abuses in Gaza in 2024 have been extensively documented by the International Court of Justice; the International Criminal Court (ICC); various bodies of the United Nations including the United Nations General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967 and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of Palestinian People in the Occupied Territories; global, Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, DAWN, B'tselem, Al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and various others. Almost all of these sources (hereinafter "credible sources") have previously been treated as credible and included as such in prior State Department Reports.
The information compiled by these credible sources includes evidence of genocide; starvation of the civilian population and deprivation of items essential to the survival of the civilian population; intentional attacks against civilians; mutilation of corpses; destruction of educational, religious, and cultural sites; deliberate attacks on hospitals and medical clinics; deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on journalists resulting in over 100 killed by Israeli forces; torture and sexual violence against detainees; arbitrary imprisonment and disappearances; extrajudicial executions; perfidy and use of human shields. As a result of these abuses, 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes; over over 60,000 killed and 150,000 injured, resulting in Gaza having the highest recorded toll of child amputees in the world; at least 17,000 children orphaned; and the systematic and widespread destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure, agricultural lands, commercial factories, schools, and government offices. Israel has rendered the vast majority of Gaza into a wasteland.
In addition, various of these credible sources have documented serious human rights abuses by Israeli forces in the West Bank, deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, the killings of three American citizens in 2024; unlawful expropriation of Palestinian property and expanded construction of illegal settlements; and military backing and impunity for "settler" violence in the West Bank, and arson attacks, all of which have terrorized Palestinians throughout the West Bank.
During 2024, the global momentum for Israeli accountability for violations gained momentum. For various of these abuses, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Israel's two most senior government officials in 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The International Court of Justice issued provisional orders finding Israel is plausibly committing genocide, and ruled that Israel's occupation is illegal, constitutes apartheid, and must end. Over a dozen states have imposed arms embargoes on Israel, including Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
In contrast, the current Administration, including Secretary Rubio, has been particularly defensive of Israel, going so far as to attempt to deport foreign students or other persons who have criticized Israel for its problematic human rights record. Although the Department's Human Rights Reports are supposed to be neutral, balanced documents, the Administration's political position has influenced the 2024 Israel/WBG Human Rights Report. The result is a document that is not credible; omits highly relevant information about Israeli human rights violations; largely fails to include information from sources outside the government of Israel (GOI); and instead includes GOI information, denials or versions of events that often take up more text than descriptions of the violations themselves.
Methodology
In order to understand the substantive changes to the report, the authors conducted a study to compare the 2024 Israel and WBG sections of the Report to previous years. To assess what has changed in the 2024 Israel/WBG Report, the authors conducted a line-by-line review of each section, with a particular focus on reporting relating to armed forces (i.e. Israeli Security Forces (ISF), including the Israel Defense Forces (IDF); Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF); and Hamas), in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. The focus on Israeli security forces is particularly appropriate in light of the intense level of armed conflict involving Israeli security forces in 2024 and the vast quantities of military assistance the United States provides to Israel. The authors then conducted a comparative analysis of the 2024 Report (published in August 2025) with the 2023 Report (published in 2024) and the 2021 Report (published in 2022), the latter in order to ensure a pre-October 7th baseline was present, but also to capture a year in which there was significant conflict in Gaza.
References:
2024 HRR Report sections on Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip
2023 HRR Report sections on Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip
2021 HRR Report sections on Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip
Conclusion
The State Department has seriously degraded the 2024 Israel/WBG Report from previous Reports in terms of quality, utility, and credibility. Rather than a valuable tool for the global human rights community and a frank accounting of human rights violations in Israel-Palestine, the 2024 Israel/WBG Report appears to function as an expression of Administration policy to unconditionally support and defend Israel's record of human rights abuses, rather than an input into its formulation. The Report appears written to provide a simple affirmation of existing Administration policy of unqualified support for the Netanyahu government, and as an ex ante rationale for future foreign policy decisions favoring Israel, especially on security assistance. This is an especially egregious failure in view of the unprecedented levels of human rights and international humanitarian law violations by Israel in 2024, which are by all objective reporting the highest for the country since the State Department began issuing the Reports in 1977.
Findings
A review of the 2024 Israel/WBG sections of the Report, published in August 2025, identifies a broad range of substantive changes to the tone, level of detail, and methodology of the work, compared to two recent previous iterations. Whereas previous reports provided extensive details and examples of issues of human rights concern, much of it sourced to independent third parties such as the United Nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the 2024 Report contains very little detail or substance to back up any allegations that are made. The Report is further weakened by the absolute removal of coverage of some areas of human rights concern (e.g. Gender-Based Violence). Most notably, the Report introduces significant bias by failing to mention or to substantiate broadly documented abuses by Israel's security forces, such as the deliberate starvation of the civilian population, extrajudicial killings and torture. In the few instances that the Report identifies incidents of Israeli abuse, it pairs each reported incident with a defense of Israel's actions, while making no such effort to explain or excuse violations on the Palestinian side.
1- Reduction in content The most striking change in the 2024 text is how much shorter it is than previous iterations, despite a year in which conflict-related abuses by Israel soared. The Israel section is 2,829 words, compared to 30,121 in 2023 and 23,267 in 2021. The WBG section is 4,682 words, compared to 44,792 in 2023 and 25,654 in 2021. All of the 2024 country Reports appear in, it should be noted, a larger font with wider line spacing. In presenting the 2024 Reports, State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce argued from the podium that "less is more." But even before detailing the further findings of this analysis, it should be quite clear that, particularly with 2024's deepened and expanded human rights catastrophe in the WBG, that less is less, and significantly so.
2- Reduction in scope: Certain human rights violations that previous Reports covered have disappeared entirely in the 2024 Report. For instance, the Report does not make any reference to threats to the LGBTQI community or to sexual and gender-based violence, though there were significant reports of sexual abuse by Israeli forces and these were a standard element of previous reports. A 2024 report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel noted that more than 20 cases of sexual and gender-based violence by Israeli security forces against male and female Palestinian detainees in more than 10 military and Israel Prison Service facilities, in particular in Negev prison and Sde Teiman camp for male detainees and in Damon and Hasharon prisons for female detainees.The report found that Israeli forces used sexual violence "as a means of punishment and intimidation from the moment of arrest and throughout detention, including during interrogations and searches."
3- Reluctant criticism of Israel. The Report glosses over significant areas of concern from the previous reports when it comes to Israel. Where Israeli abuses are mentioned, they are generally followed by a defense or explanation of Israel's actions that in several cases quote directly from the GOI without presenting any alternative perspectives, and in most cases actually take up more text than the violation being mentioned.
a- War crimes/crimes against humanity/genocide/conflict-related abuses: Internationally-recognized human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, reported extensive Israeli war crimes and related abuses in 2024. Amnesty International, other NGOs, and scholars, including Israeli scholars, accused Israel of genocide. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza. Notably, neither section of the 2024 report mentions the ICC's arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant. (By way of comparison, the 2024 and 2023 Russia Reports both mention the ICC arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova.) Based on reports from international organizations and testimonies collected by field researchers, B'Tselem reported in April that Israel had been committing the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip for months.
The 2024 Report fails to even mention genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. Despite the overwhelming evidence of these crimes by credible sources, the WBG section bizarrely mentions only a single July Israeli airstrike on a Palestinian camp that killed 90 civilians, followed by Israel's explanation that the strike also killed Hamas members, and the April Israeli killing of seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers, followed by the IDF's characterization of the incident as a "tragic mistake." The Report's WCK narrative fails to include the WCK statement that the attack was systematic, consisting of multiple strikes against three marked WCK vehicles, and that Israeli authorities were aware of their itinerary, route, and mission. The Israel section mentions only Hamas's and Hizballah's targeting of Israeli civilians.
b- Extrajudicial killings: According to B'tselem, Israeli forces extrajudicially killed 479 Palestinians in 2024, 89 of them minors. Although the Executive Summary of the Israel section of the 2024 Report correctly identifies arbitrary and unlawful killings as a significant violation, the extrajudicial killings (EJKs) portion in the report is just one sentence, citing Palestinian deaths in custody, with no details. In comparison, the 2023 Israel section on EJKs was a page and a half, citing two specific EJKs by Israeli security officials. The 2021 Israel section EJK portion was four pages, citing six EJKs by Israeli security officials.
The half-page 2024 WBG narrative on killings is particularly deficient in failing to note credible reports of widespread Israeli EJKs of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In May 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that unlawful killings of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli security forces were taking place at "a level without precedent." A 2025 Al Jazeera report documented a pattern of Israeli sniper killings of children in Gaza that began in 2023 and continued in 2024.
Instead, the Report leads with killings by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and, for the ISF, cites only the killing of U.S. citizen Aysenur Eygi, with half of the paragraph given to an IDF statement that asserts its forces shot her "indirectly and unintentionally." The report fails to note a Washington Post investigation that included multiple eyewitness interviews and contradicted IDF accounts of the killing, and included the fact that the supposed unintentional killing was a shot through the head from approximately 200 meters away. By contrast to 2024, the 2023 and 2021 WBG EJK portions both cite multiple instances of EJKs by Israeli security forces, backed by NGO and UN reporting, and name specific Israeli units responsible for the killings.
c– Torture/cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment: Torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody reached unprecedented proportions in 2024, with more organizations documenting severe mistreatment than in any prior year in the past several decades. U.N. Experts described the widespread and systematic nature of torture in Israeli prisons in 2024 as "crimes against humanity." Yet the 2024 Israel section on torture, prison conditions, and related abuses consists of three sentences, led by forner hostages' accounts of Hamas mistreatment. The section notes Shin Bet's use of violent interrogation tactics, with no specifics and no accounts from former Palestinian detainees. It omits any mention of prison conditions. Notably absent is any mention of Israel's notorious Sde Tieman detention facility, including 2024 allegations of sexual assault of Palestinian detanees by Israeli guards. The 2024 WBG section is half a page relating only to the PA and Hamas. The 2024 sections stand in stark contrast to the same sections of the 2023 and 2021 Reports, which take up multiple pages and cite NGO and UN reports of Israeli violations.
d-Disappearance and abduction: The 2024 Reports eliminate what were previously two separate sections, one on disappearances and the other on arbitrary arrest/detention, combining them into a single disappearance/abduction section. (However, the 2024 Israel section Executive Summary cites "arbitrary arrest or detention" as an issue.) Despite credible reports in 2024 of widescale arbitrary and incommunicado detention of Palestinians, the disappearance/abduction portion of the 2024 Israel section is just one page, leading with a reference to Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The section cites "reports of disappearances on behalf of government authorities," followed by an explanation that most of the individuals were Palestinians arrested in Gaza and held in Israel. The section then includes a page-long explanation of Israeli law and practice on detentions, including in Gaza. In contrast, the 2021 and 2023 arbitrary arrest and detention portions of the Israel section are five and seven and a half pages, respectively.
The 2024 WBG disappearance/abduction portion does not even mention Israel. It is only half a page, finding fault in Hamas for not releasing those whom it detains on bail. In contrast, the 2023 WBG arbitrary arrest/detention portion is nine pages; it includes information about the PA and Hamas, but the majority of the portion is about Israeli practices. The 2021 portion is seven pages, mostly about Israel. Both 2023 and 2021 portions include detailed descriptions of the inequality of the legal processes for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, and the violations that occur in the context of Israel's detentions of Palestinian children.
e– Freedom of the press: In 2024, press freedom in Israel and WGB worsened. Military censorship increased and Israeli journalists engaged in self-censorship about events in Gaza. By the end of October 2024, at least 134 journalists and media workers had been killed in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023. The 2024 Israel section notes restrictions, attacks on journalists (but no deaths), and censorship without citing any examples. The WBG section of the 2024 Report makes only passing mention of Israel's closure of Al Jazeera's West Bank office (explaining that Israel "identified a pro-Hamas slant to al-Jazeera coverage"). Though it notes that 82 reporters were killed in 2024 "as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict" (rather than by Israeli forces, which would be more accurate), it cannot help but excuse these violations by noting that in some cases "the IDF claimed the journalists killed were embedded with Hamas terrorists." The WBG Report notably fails to include the fact that Israel barred international journalists from entering Gaza except as allowed by, and accompanied by, the IDF.
4-Reduction in use of NGO data: Another notable difference is the paucity of by-name citations of NGOs and use of NGO data. Previous reports used granular information about specific abuses with attribution to a wide range of Israeli, Palestinian and international NGOs, as well as the UN and other reliable/credible agencies. The 2024 Report section on Israel, by contrast, contains just three NGO references: that "NGOs" reported deaths in Israeli custody; that "NGOs and journalists" reported restrictions on the press; and that the Israeli Union of Journalists reported 13 detentions and five attacks on journalists.
In the 2024 Report's WBG section, the only named NGO is the U.S.-based Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), which is cited once. All other assertions in the report are either accredited vaguely to "NGOs and the press" or, as commonly, to the IDF. This is an issue not only because the independent and in-depth reporting and analysis that NGOs like Yesh-Din, Ir Amim, HaMoked, Combatants for Peace, and Lawyers for Justice adds substance and important detail to previous reports, but also because by citing them, the U.S. Government is making a statement that these organizations are credible and reliable enough for the U.S. Government to cite their work. Such an implicit endorsement can function as a political shield against local government interference, and the absence of named Israeli or Palestinian NGOs in the WBG section means not only a reduction in the quality of the report, but also a weakening of U.S. support for civil society at a time when its work has never been more vital.
5-Paving the way for further sanctions on the Palestinians. Notably, the WBG section of the 2024 Report introduces the new (compared to the 2023 and 2021 reports) allegation that both the P.A. and Hamas are engaged in trafficking in persons. This may indicate that the Trump Administration intends to sanction the PA under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. However, the basis for this new allegation of trafficking is unclear given that the report provides no evidence to back up the assertion, and in a separate section on human trafficking simply refers the reader to the State Department's Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Report. However, as the Rubio State Department has not yet submitted its first TIP Report, the reader can only refer to the last TIP Report from the Biden Administration, which makes no mention of the PA or Hamas. As a result, the allegation itself turns out to be an example of the politicization of the report rather than a credible analysis of the human risks identified.
