U.S. Declined to Sanction Israeli Military Units over Abuse Finding

The Washington Post

14:43 JST, March 1, 2025

The State Department made a recommendation to halt funding to several Israeli military units over the reported abuse of Palestinian detainees during the final months of the Biden administration, former officials said, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken stopped short of authorizing what would have been an unprecedented rebuke of Israel’s armed forces.

The proposed suspension of assistance to two units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) under the Leahy law, which prohibits U.S. assistance from going to foreign militaries linked to severe human rights abuses, would have represented a significant moment in the Biden administration’s strained relationship with Israel.

Despite President Joe Biden’s sustained military and diplomatic support for Israel’s war against Hamas militants following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, his administration was often at odds with Jerusalem over its conduct of the offensive and the tens of thousands of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.

Former officials said the U.S. government assessed there was credible information that the IDF units – a military police body known as Force 100 and the interrogations component of a military intelligence entity called Force 504 – engaged in what U.S. officials deemed to be credible reports of abuse of Palestinian detainees.

Officials submitted two action memos to Blinken recommending the suspension of funding under the law – an initial one sent in early October and a revised one later in the month with a narrower application – without dissent from any State Department bureaus. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive process that was not made public, and Blinken could not immediately be reached for comment.

While Blinken consulted extensively with other State Department officials about the suspension for those units, former officials said, he stepped down on Jan. 20 without having done so. Former officials involved in the deliberations gave differing accounts of what occurred.

“This is another example of President Biden’s repeated failure to apply our laws uniformly, to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for human rights violations,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said in an interview. “They turned a blind eye to human rights violations by the Netanyahu government and did not apply the law that applies to every country that receives U.S. military assistance.”

Widespread reports of the abuse of Gazans imprisoned after Oct. 7, many of whom were held at the Sde Teiman military site in the Negev desert, kicked off a major controversy within Israel and divided the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After Israeli authorities detained reservists accused of involvement, far-right demonstrators attempted to storm the prison.

One former senior State Department official said that department officials spent weeks attempting to verify which specific units were involved and what actions the Israeli government was taking to hold them accountable, a process that “was ongoing up through our final days in office.”

The official said that Blinken and his top advisers faced a “really difficult challenge” in that they believed a suspension of aid to those units could derail the chances for clinching a ceasefire – which came together on Jan. 16, aided by pressure from Donald Trump, then president-elect, after more than a year of frustrating negotiations by Blinken and his team. The official also noted that any suspension would probably be overturned by the new administration just days later.

“There was a very real possibility that finding them in violation before a ceasefire was finalized could ruin the chance of getting a ceasefire approved by the Israeli cabinet,” the former official said. “So we had to make a difficult call about reaching a finding that would be symbolic for a few days but could ruin the chance of actually ending the war.

“So we were pushing forward in the process, were ready to do it, wanted to find a way that didn’t jeopardize the ceasefire, and ultimately ran out of time given how late the ceasefire was agreed to,” the former official said.

Another former official said the Leahy law was “crystal clear that you don’t wait and see if accountability is forthcoming; you suspend aid to the unit that committed the violation, and you lift the restriction later if the perpetrators are brought to justice.”

The former official said State Department leaders “decided for policy or political reasons not to move forward even with clear evidence of detainees being tortured and even killed, despite the legal requirement to suspend aid to the Israeli units that were responsible for these abuses.”

The Israeli embassy did not provide an immediate comment.

The recommended sanction and the decision not to go ahead with it provide new insights into the turmoil that gripped the Biden administration over U.S. support for Israel throughout the war, which generated dissent within the diplomatic corps and emerged as a political liability for Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris.

While Biden staked out a position of strong support for Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed 1,200 people and resulted in roughly 250 being taken hostage, the administration increasingly voiced concern over Israel’s military campaign, which killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza. The United States is Israel’s chief military and financial backer.

While a fragile ceasefire holds, the war remains a partisan issue in domestic U.S. politics. Some congressional Democrats have spoken out in favor of more conditioned support for Israel. The Trump administration meanwhile has embraced an approach more in line with Israel’s far right.

One of Trump’s first moves after his inauguration was to repeal sanctions on certain West Bank settlers imposed by Biden, one of his toughest censures against the Jewish state.

The proposed sanction of IDF units would have represented the first-ever application of the Leahy law, introduced in the 1990s after years of U.S. support for foreign militaries that violated human rights in Latin America and elsewhere.

Earlier in 2024, State Department officials identified a cohort of IDF units linked to human rights abuses, but found that Israel had effectively taken steps to deal with most of those cases.

In a final case, State Department officials suggested for months they were preparing to suspend assistance to an ultra-Orthodox battalion called Netzah Yehuda, which was accused in the wrongful 2022 killing of an elderly Palestinian-American man and other abuses, but decided against it after finding that problematic actions had been “effectively remediated.” Some experts in the Leahy law said that process was flawed.

In a May 2024 Opinion article in The Washington Post, former senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont), the architect of the law, accused successive administrations of foot-dragging efforts to apply Leahy law to Israel.

A 2021 U.S.-Israeli memorandum provides a special process for Israel in applying the Leahy law, citing the country’s judicial system and says the U.S. government will “give full consideration and all due weight to examinations or investigations and judicial or administrative adjudications that have been or are being carried out.” But those involved in drafting the Leahy law say those rules do not alter the requirement that assistance be suspended once units are determined to be violating human rights.

“Aid can resume if the foreign government is taking ‘effective steps’ to bring the responsible members of the unit to justice,” Leahy said in his op-ed.

Tim Rieser, who served as a foreign policy aide to Leahy and has spent decades monitoring implementation of the law across administrations, said the law was “unambiguous.”

“How anyone could argue that credible information of a gross violation of human rights does not require the secretary to act is inexplicable to me,” he said.

In early February, an Israeli military court reached a plea agreement in which a soldier who admitted to beating detainees at Sde Teiman would serve seven months in jail.

Also in February, a military prosecutor indicted five reservist soldiers who were members of Force 100 over abuse at the site, including a July incident in which troops were caught on camera appearing to conduct an extreme beating – including stabbing a detainee in his rectum with a sharp object.

It appears unlikely the Trump administration would take up the proposal to suspend aid to the IDF. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has previously said such Leahy determinations would “stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.”