Abdelhalim Abdelrahman is a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst covering Palestinian affairs, U.S. politics and the broader Middle East. He is a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society.
In early April, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian-American teenager in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya. Fourteen-year-old Amer Rabee joined Ayesnur Eygi, Shireen Abu Akleh, Omar Assad, Mohammad Khdour, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar and Rachel Corrie on a long list of American citizens killed by the Israeli military, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world.
Two other Palestinian-American teenagers who were with Rabee at the time were also shot and injured by Israeli soldiers. The Israel Defense Forces claimed in a statement that the soldiers fired on "terrorists" who had thrown rocks at a highway in the occupied West Bank, but surveillance footage showed the soldiers firing 47 shots at the three boys while they were picking almonds.
The U.S. government could end this all too familiar paradigm of Israeli impunity and grant justice to Rabee's family by enforcing the law. Created by former Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy in 1997, the Leahy laws are two statutory provisions that prohibit the Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance and American weaponry to foreign military units that are credibly implicated in committing gross violations of human rights, as explicitly laid out in the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.
The U.S. government could end this all too familiar paradigm of Israeli impunity and grant justice to Rabee's family by enforcing the law.
- Abdelhalim Abdelrahman
In Rabee's case, the gross violation of human rights in question would be extrajudicial killing, as defined under both the Leahy law and the Foreign Assistance Act. The IDF claimed that Rabee was allegedly throwing rocks and thus posed a threat. To justify its claim, the Israeli military released a grainy, 10-second video in black and white that appears to show three people throwing rocks, one of whom they say was Rabee. Yet the people are not at all identifiable in the video. So the IDF shot and killed this 14-year-old, and injured two other teenagers, with no actual evidence that they posed a threat.
Based off these facts alone, an independent investigation could determine which IDF unit was responsible—and if a U.S. weapon was used by the Israeli soldiers who shot and killed Rabee. If so, it would echo the case of Aysenur Eygi, an American and Turkish dual citizen, who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier during a peaceful protest in the West Bank town of Beita, near Nablus, last year. A 5.56mm-caliber armor-piercing slug consistent with an American M4 assault rifle was retrieved from her body.
For nearly two decades, the State Department has avoided vetting Israeli military units for possible Leahy violations. Whenever such investigations began, they were met with a flurry of bureaucracy designed to shield Israel from accountability. The most notorious instance came last year, when then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken blocked the Leahy designation of Netzah Yehuda, the IDF unit responsible for the 2022 killing of 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad. After detaining Assad for no apparent reason, members of the Netzah Yehuda battalion bound and gagged him, leaving him at a construction site, where he died of a stress-induced heart attack. In 2022, after an IDF internal report faulted the soldiers for "a clear lapse of moral judgment" but did not hold them criminally responsible for Assad's death, the State Department said that the U.S. government "expects a thorough criminal investigation and full accountability in this case."
Blinken's intervention in Assad's case was symbolic of a top-down, systematic effort within the U.S. government to ensure that Israel was exempted from any ramifications that may come with the Leahy designation, extending back through several administrations, both Democratic and Republican. But more fundamentally, it was a symptom of a greater issue: the willingness of the U.S. to subvert the rule of law at the behest of Israel, while arbitrarily applying those same laws to other countries. Exempting Israel from the Leahy law provisions—along with a series of other measures on U.S. weapons export—has fostered a culture of impunity for Israel to violate both U.S. and international law with American-made arms.
Finally enforcing the Leahy law for the killing of Amer Rabee would help break this status quo and send a firm message to Israel.
- Abdelhalim Abdelrahman
Enforcing the Leahy law for the IDF's extrajudicial killing of Amer Rabee would set a new precedent of accountability for Israeli military abuses and provide a pathway to justice for other American citizens killed by the IDF in the occupied West Bank. The special treatment the United States affords Israel, in effect, has resulted in a significant roadblock in pursuing justice for Americans killed by Israeli soldiers in territory under an illegal military occupation.
It has become a broken record at this point: The IDF claims to be conducting a "counterterror operation," an American citizen is killed by Israeli soldiers, and the United States, regardless of the administration in Washington, is all-too ready to accept Israel's explanation and impose no consequences on the largest recipient of U.S. miliary aid for killing an American citizen.
While the IDF claims that Amer Rabee and other Palestinian boys were throwing rocks, how is that even justification for Israeli soldiers to use lethal force against children? Violent Israeli settlers don't just throw stones at Palestinians, they also kill them and firebomb their homes, all while the IDF stands by, refusing to arrest the settlers and sometimes even actively supporting them amid their rampages against Palestinians. The injustice is profound, the lack of accountability damning. Finally enforcing the Leahy law for the killing of Amer Rabee would help break this status quo and send a firm message: Israel cannot murder American citizens without repercussions, and the U.S. government will enforce the law when it comes to Israel.
