In Historic First, Lawsuit Supported by DAWN Charges State Department under Administrative Procedure Act for Harming Plaintiffs by Arbitrary and Capricious Failure to Enforce the Leahy Law
(Washington D.C., December 17, 2024) – Palestinian families devastated by Israeli human rights violations in Gaza and the West Bank filed a federal lawsuit today under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) challenging the State Department's arbitrary and capricious failure to implement the Leahy Law prohibiting U.S. assistance to abusive Israeli security forces. The lawsuit, supported by DAWN, documents how the State Department has created 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.
"This 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," said Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN's Executive Director. "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."
Stephen Rickard, a former State Department official and former Senior Staff Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who helped pass the Leahy Law and worked on and monitored its implementation for more than a quarter of a century, stated:
"There is only one country where the Department of State has a 'see no evil, hear no evil' policy: Israel. Longstanding concerns that the State Department was not cutting off aid to specific Israel units as required by the Leahy Law… have been given dramatic urgency by the tragic ongoing crisis in Gaza. If the State Department will not comply with the law, then it is time for the courts to vindicate the rule of law and order it to do so."
The Leahy Law
The Leahy Law, passed in 1997, prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security force units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations. From 1997 to 2019, the State Department did not vet the vast majority of Israeli units receiving aid because Israel did not disclose the units that receive aid. In response, in 2019, Congress amended the law to require the State Department to vet in advance all security forces of countries receiving untraceable aid to determine abusive units ineligible for aid and prohibit them from receiving it. Despite extensive documentation from credible sources, including the State Department's own Annual Human Rights Reports, of Israeli forces committing gross human rights violations, the State Department has never prohibited a single Israeli unit from receiving aid, even after the amendment to the law.
"The State Department's preposterous, incredible conclusion that not even one unit of Israeli security forces has ever committed unremediated abuses in nearly thirty years, despite the staggering, horrifying evidence before the world's eyes every single day for the past year, speaks for itself," said Whitson. "The reality is that the State Department has never sanctioned a single Israeli unit because the State Department has chosen to defy the law based on arbitrary, political calculations."
The complaint documents the internal, exceptional, and deliberately cumbersome processes the State Department created exclusively for Israel. Former State Department officials and current DAWN colleagues Josh Paul and Charles Blaha, who previously worked vetting Israeli security force units, describe a process seemingly designed to avoid finding Israeli units ineligible. The complaint further describes how Secretary Blinken personally intervened to block the designation of the one Israeli unit staff sought to sanction for the first time in the Leahy Law's history, the Netzah Yehuda unit responsible for the unlawful killing of 78-year old American Omar Assad, by overriding the law's strict requirement that a foreign government hold abusers accountable to overcome ineligibility by asserting instead that there was a "roadmap to remediation," a completely made up standard that violates the specific remediation requirements of the law.
"It shouldn't take a lawsuit to get the U.S. Government to obey its own laws," said DAWN Fellow Josh Paul, and formerly a Director in the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. "But it was quite clear from my own experience, and as a part of the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, 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."
Evidence of Israeli Gross Violations of Human Rights from 1997 – 2024
The complaint details the vast record of Israeli abuses under each category of "gross violations of human rights" defined in the law, including torture, prolonged detention without charge, forced disappearance, and other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or security of millions of Palestinians subject to Israeli gross violations of human rights, such as genocide, indiscriminate and deliberate killings, and deprivation of items essential to their survival, including food, water, fuel and medicine. Many of these abuses are described in detail in the State Department's own annual "Human Rights Reports" on Israel since 1997, including torture, arbitrary and prolonged detention without charge, and extrajudicial executions. The complaint also documents the vast trove of documentation of Israeli human rights violations by human rights organizations, humanitarian organizations, independent news reports, and United Nations investigative reports since passage of the law.
"Any of these abuses by foreign security forces of any other country would have immediately resulted in sanctions, but the State Department has always given Israel a pass," said Charles Blaha, DAWN's senior advisor, who was Director of the State Department Office of Security and Human Rights, which is responsible for implementing Leahy vetting worldwide.
Since the start of the war in Gaza in 2023, gross violations of human rights have escalated to unprecedented, horrific proportions. Both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, the two leading judicial bodies with authority to sanction states and officials for violations of human rights and other international laws, are proceeding with trials against Israeli security forces for some of the worst abuses known to humanity, including genocide, apartheid, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against the two most senior government officials in Israel who command and control all of the country's security forces, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and (former) Defense Minister Gallant; the court's charges against them include the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare, crimes against humanity such as murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, and the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilian populations, each of which constitute a gross violation of the right to life, liberty and security, as enshrined in the Leahy Law's definition of human rights violations.
The International Court of Justice has found Israel guilty of illegal occupation, apartheid and persecution, causing severe violations of the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli control, and ordering Israel to end its crimes. In another case reviewing the claims of South Africa against Israel for genocide, the court ordered Israel to immediately cease its deprivations of items essential to the survival of the population, including food, water, medicine, and fuel, finding that Israel's actions appeared to be plausibly genocidal.
This month, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing the crime of genocide, perhaps the gravest human rights violation in the world, following similar findings by DAWN, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and global genocide scholars over the past year. Human Rights Watch has also documented widespread abuses, including the forced displacement of approximately 1.9 million Palestinians, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a method of warfare, all of which constitute severe violations of international law.
Tim Rieser, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Leahy for 35 years who focused on the Leahy Law, explained:
"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. That is the record, despite Senator Leahy urging successive administrations to apply the law. He 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."
Role of U.S. Military Assistance and Failure to Enforce Leahy Law in Harm to Plaintiffs
The complaint documents the vast dependence of the Israeli military to U.S. military assistance, including $17.9 billion in military aid this year comprising the majority of Israel's weapons expenditures. Every security force unit in Israel effectively receives U.S. assistance because the U.S. gives the vast majority of its aid as cash assistance under the Foreign Military Financing program allowing Israel to to buy and distribute weapons and equipment to all of its forces at its sole discretion, which it does not disclose to the United States.
The complaint urges the court to compel the State Department to obey the Leahy Law with respect to Israel, explaining how such enforcement would curtail Israeli abuses and mitigate the risk of imminent harm that each of the plaintiffs face. Were the State Department to faithfully and fully enforce the Leahy Law with respect to Israel, the complaint asserts, 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, particularly in the past year, and clear evidence that the commanders in chief of the Israeli forces, including the Prime Minister and Defense Minister, ordered their forces to carry out the human rights violations for which they now face arrest, and thereby tainted all Israeli units under their command from receiving U.S. assistance. Such a curtailment of U.S. military assistance as a consequence of abiding by the Leahy Law would both limit the ability of Israeli forces to carry out abuses, depriving them of the equipment they use in abuses, and deter other units from carrying out abuses to preserve further loss of aid. Both circumstances would materially diminish the harm to plaintiffs.
"Complying with the Leahy Law is not a 'political question' for executive branch discretion, but strict legal requirements imposed by Congress on the State Department," said Whitson. "The power of the purse belongs to Congress, and Congress decides the conditions on where it wants the executive branch to spend taxpayer funds abroad."
The complaint further demands that the State Department end its arbitrary and capricious refusal to substantively apply the Leahy Law and faithfully implement its mandatory duties by withholding U.S. assistance from Israeli units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations. It seeks a judicial declaration that Defendant's failure to prohibit such units from receiving assistance, failure to furnish Israel with a list of prohibited units, and the imposition of unique, burdensome vetting procedures for Israel are contrary to the plain language and purpose of the Leahy Law. It additionally requests an order compelling the State Department to comply with the law by providing Israel with a list of prohibited units, obtaining written assurances that these units will not receive further aid, and enjoining the State Department from continuing to fund any Israeli forces credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights. Finally, the complaint seeks a permanent injunction preventing future disbursements to abusive Israeli units and requests the award of costs, attorney fees, and such other relief as is just and proper.
"Were the State Department to implement the Leahy Law with respect to Israel, it's pretty clear that no Israeli unit would receive a dime of U.S. aid because of the overwhelming record of their abuses," said Raed Jarrar, DAWN's Advocacy Director. "Were the State Department to enforce our law, Israel's ability to harm Palestinians, including the plaintiffs in their lawsuit, would be significantly diminished."
The Plaintiffs
The plaintiffs are Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans who have lost family members or face imminent threats to themselves and their relatives due to Israeli military operations using U.S.-supplied weapons. Their experiences collectively illustrate the extensive harm caused by Israeli military forces receiving U.S. military assistance, in violation of the law.
The lead plaintiff is Amal Gaza (a pseudonym for her safety), a mathematics teacher in Gaza, who has endured seven forced displacements since October 2023, losing her home, belongings, and 20 family members to indiscriminate attacks by U.S.-armed Israeli security forces. She lives under constant threat of death or injury and fears further forced displacement or the loss of her surviving family from abusive Israeli forces. "My suffering and the unimaginable loss my family has endured would be significantly lessened if the U.S. stopped providing military assistance to Israeli units committing gross violations of human rights," said Gaza.
Another plaintiff is Shawan Jabarin, Executive Director of the West Bank-based human rights organization Al-Haq, who has faced years of persecution by U.S.-funded Israeli security forces, including six years of arbitrary detention without charge on the basis of secret evidence, under abusive rules Israel has used to imprison tens of thousands of Palestinians. Residing in the West Bank, he fears for his own safety and that of his extensive family, spread across the West Bank, who live under constant threat of extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate military raids, and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment at checkpoints.
Shawan argues that properly enforcing the Leahy Law would curb these abuses and protect his family and community:
"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 Jabarin. "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."
Palestinian-American plaintiffs include Ahmed Moor, who fears losing seven family members in Gaza whom U.S.-funded Israeli security forces have forcibly displaced and now live in tents after Israeli forces indiscriminately destroyed their homes, depriving them of their right to life, liberty, and security, each a gross violation of human rights. U.S. funded Israeli forces extrajudicially killed one of his relatives in November 2023.
"My surviving family members in Gaza have been forcibly displaced four times since October, living in constant fear of indiscriminate Israeli attacks carried out with American weapons," said Ahmed Moor. "The U.S. government's military assistance to these abusive Israeli forces, which our own laws prohibit, is enabling these Israeli harms to me and my family."
Similarly, Said and Hadeel Assali, Palestinian-American siblings, have lost multiple relatives in Gaza, including six of their cousins, in an indiscriminate Israeli airstrike by abusive Israeli forces, and one other cousin targeted and killed unlawfully by an Israeli sniper. Both worry about the ongoing risks to their remaining family members, who live under continuous, indiscriminate bombardment, depriving them of their right to life, security and liberty. They argue that enforcing the Leahy Law would reduce these harms by cutting off U.S. support for Israeli units involved in human rights violations.
"We are worried about our relatives in Gaza – the ones who have survived – because the U.S. continues to arm abusive Israeli forces who have already indiscriminately killed so many of our family members. If the US would stop sending these abusive forces more weapons, our loved ones would have a much better chance of surviving," Said and Hadeel Assalis said.
DAWN is a U.S.-based organization that promotes democracy and human rights in the Middle East and reform of U.S. foreign policy in the region. DAWN provided resources and support to enable the plaintiffs to pursue this landmark legal action. The organization connected plaintiffs with legal representation, conducted extensive research documenting violations of the Leahy Law, and helped develop the legal strategy to challenge the State Department's systematic failure to enforce the law with respect to Israel. DAWN was founded by the late Jamal Khashoggi, whom Saudi operatives murdered under the orders of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman.
"This lawsuit represents a critical step in holding our government accountable to its own laws," said Jarrar. "When our government institutions fail to uphold the law, we have a responsibility to force them to do so and seek accountability through the courts."
Leahy Law Expert Commentary
- Tim Rieser, former foreign policy advisor for Senator Leahy:
"I served as Senator Leahy's foreign policy adviser for more than 35 years, and during most of that time, I worked on the Leahy Law.
The Leahy Law has prevented U.S. taxpayer-funded training and equipment from going to foreign military and police units that have violated human rights, while also ensuring that aid continued to the many more units that respect human rights. The Law has become institutionalized, and it continues to have bipartisan support in Congress as well as in the Departments of State and Defense.
Unfortunately, Israel has been an exception. 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.
That is the record, despite Senator Leahy urging successive administrations to apply the law. He 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.
The State Department should follow the Leahy Law and provide Israel and the Congress a list of units of Israel's security forces that are ineligible for U.S. aid until the perpetrators are brought to justice."
- Stephen Rickard, former State Department official, former Senior Staff Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former Washington Director of Amnesty International USA
"I helped pass the Leahy Law and have worked on and monitored its implementation in various capacities for more than a quarter of a century. The Leahy Law helps assure the American people that their tax dollars are not underwriting gross violations of human rights. As far as I know, there is only one country where the Department of State has a "see no evil, hear no evil" policy: Israel. Longstanding concerns that the State Department was not cutting off aid to specific Israel units as required by the Leahy Law….have been given dramatic urgency by the tragic ongoing crisis in Gaza. If the Department of State will not comply with the law, then it is time for the courts to vindicate the rule of law and order it to do so."
- John Chappell, Advocacy and Legal Advisor, Center of Civilians in Conflict
"In failing to implement the law in good faith for units of Israeli security forces, the Biden Administration has undermined U.S. credibility, corroded the rule of law, and sent a message of impunity to the Netanyahu government. Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered horrific consequences. All recipients of U.S. security assistance must be held to the same standards outlined in US and international law."
