Equity (Page 9)

The Asia-Pacific area is a powerful gateway of economic growth and individual development. Network tower is rising, life expectancy is increasing, hunger is declining, health care and education, albeit with some limitations, are improving.

By contrast, quite remarkable progress is lacking in some areas of management, no least the rule of law and access to justice. In the Asia-Pacific, where millions of people are denied their legal rights, protracted prison without trial is common, and where the court systems frequently lack integrity, transparency, and transparency, the justice system remains a place.

Not everyone is treated equally in court or before a court. In some Asia-Pacific states, women face widespread prejudice, most vividly in Afghanistan. They do not have the same access to authorities as men do, and their judgments frequently disregard their statements and rights. They also do not have the same property rights and inheritance rights as men.

Also, excluded and minority neighborhoods – such as indigenous cultures, persons with disabilities, and remote and displaced populations find access to justice to be a difficult problem, especially in matters of civil justice. And some people in conflict-ridden nations like Myanmar are left without access to formal fairness systems.

Justice is more than regulations and courthouses, it is the basis of capital, respect and resilience. It is a crucial component of social cohesion and unity in areas. Justice is a common fine that must be provided to all, just like it is with healthcare and education.

When righteousness is denied, it is not only an individual who suffers—it is the very fabric of society that is affected. Injustice perpetuates cycles of poverty and isolation, destabilizes communities, and undermines public trust.

Unfairness compounded by corruption, financial crises, and poverty ignites hate, that drives people to rally in the roads, as witnessed just in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Building on fundamental principles, the justice gap in Asia’s then prosperous development story needs to be filled.

Justice systems may be visible and fair to everyone, going beyond traditional authorities. Proper legal systems should coexist more closely with indigenous and conventional laws that have for centuries been the core of community justice across Asia and the Pacific.

Justice for all requires greater appreciation of conventional justice systems that promote diversity and trust, as well as typical law. Inspiration and potential for propagation are provided by powerful examples.

Bangladesh’s Village Courts, for example, enable remote communities to effectively handle daily disputes and develop trust and fairness by providing attainable and reasonably priced justice in remote areas.

Other mechanisms for dispute resolutions you improve justice and, in movement contexts, ease tension. In the Kachin state of Myanmar and the Cox’s Bazar, where local negotiators and civil society organizations are negotiating housing, property, and property rights, as well as work problems, this has happened in the Rohingya tents.

Legitimate assistance and having access to data are a neglected tool for improving justice. During the Covid-19 pandemic, this view proved effective, in countries like Sri Lanka and Fiji, where technology facilitated increased access to legal information, assistance, and guidance, streamlined case management, and addressed the issue of pretrial detention.

Legal assistance and access to information must move away from being a component of a crisis response and toward mainstream justice, as can be seen from these examples.

Justice must also change in order to deal with pressing issues that have been ruled out of court for far too long. Environmental protection and climate change are two of the most obvious examples. In today’s world, justice for the planet is inseparable from justice for the people.

Farmers are losing their land as a result of rising seas, homes are destroyed, and livelihoods are ruined, and air pollution threatens the health of millions of people.

At a recent United Nations Conference on Inclusive Justice Pathways for People and Planet, Richa Shrestha, a young Indigenous climate activist from Nepal, posed a powerful question:” As a law student, I learned to defend freedom of speech and political assembly. But how do I defend the air we breathe”?

Environmental harm, conflict, climate-induced displacement, exclusion, and inequality are not unrelated issues, they are deeply intertwined, leaving millions vulnerable and deprived of basic human rights. Legal frameworks must, therefore, evolve to recognize and enhance environmental justice, address climate-related disputes, and the competence of tribunals linked to environmental cases.

States are currently being sued by citizens all over the world for failing to uphold their legal obligations to protect citizens from climate and environmental issues.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in April of last year that Switzerland had violated the rights of its citizens by failing to address climate change, setting a precedent globally. Similarly, in 2021, Germany’s highest court delivered a historic ruling that deemed the government’s climate legislation insufficient for lacking detailed emission reduction targets beyond 2030.

In Asia and the Pacific, momentum for environmental justice is also growing. Since 2017, there have been more than double the number of climate change-related legal cases in the world, with about a third coming from Asia and the Pacific.

In December 2024, the International Court of Justice held hearings on governments ‘ legal obligations to protect the environment and combat climate change, following a historic 2023 UN resolution spearheaded by Vanuatu, Pacific students and 17 other countries, including Samoa, Vietnam, Micronesia and New Zealand.

The court’s decision is anticipated to be a turning point in climate justice, possibly putting international commitments into action, in 2025.

A legitimate right and a pressing need are justice systems that are fair, truly centered on the needs of the people they are meant to serve in Asia and the Pacific.

Christophe Bahuet is deputy regional director for&nbsp, Asia&nbsp, and the&nbsp, Pacific&nbsp, and director, &nbsp, UNDP&nbsp, Bangkok Regional Hub.

Continue Reading

This article was first published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning analytical news website.

Reporting features

• Costs of silence:  Experts claim that Biden’s inaction led to widespread violence for human rights violations, including preventing aid deliveries even after obvious US warnings.
• Empty challenges: &nbsp, Since October 7, 2023, Biden has repeatedly issued challenges that Israel ignored. US authorities tried to maintain consequences — but they don’t.
• Internal dissention: The State Department ignored its own researchers and acted decisively on leaks. Some individual rights authorities said they were prevented from pursuing proof of Israeli crimes.

A smaller group of senior US animal rights officials met with a top established at President Joe Biden’s State Department in early November to produce one last, unwavering appeal: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the management delivered their most obvious order however to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day— or more. British law and Biden’s personal laws prohibit hands sales to countries that restrict humanitarian assistance. Israel had 30 times to act.

In the quarter that followed, the IDF was accused of vehemently defying the US, its most important ally. According to charitable organizations, the Israeli military “tightened its hold,” continued to encircle urgently needed help trucks, and forced 100, 000 Palestinians from North Gaza, compounding what had already become a terrible problems” to its worst stage since the war began,” according to the organizations.

Some attendees at the November meet — officials who help direct the State Department’s efforts to promote racial collateral, religious freedom and various high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States ‘ global credibility had been seriously damaged by Biden’s unfailing support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel responsible, one adviser at the conference told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s consultant and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

However, the choice had already been made. Sullivan said the date would probably pass without motion and Biden had remain sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room inflated. ” Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it”? an attendee said to me later, reflecting on the decision once again to capitulate. What justifies this approach, exactly? There is no explanation they can articulate”.

Soon after the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken declared that Israelis had started following his instructions in good faith, all because of the pressure the US had put up.

That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a UN committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, were” consistent with genocide”. Amnesty International went further and discovered that a genocide was taking place. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. The warrants and the US and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination.

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1, 200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials are concerned that the Israelis feel isolated as a result of Biden’s repeated, pointless threats.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that” all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal on Wednesday after months of negotiations. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute with a focus on US-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who provided advice on prior peace negotiations, said” Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price.” ” Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying’ No’ to the current president”.

The world’s most powerful countries have long used the so-called red lines as a prominent foreign policy tool. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

Current and former US officials said the failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade when Bashar al-Assad, the then president of Syria, launched rockets with chemical gas that killed hundreds of civilians anyway, according to critics, which increased the civil war’s soaring as local extremists seized on by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII”, as Omer Bartov, a renowned]Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Former State Department assistant secretary for the Middle East bureau, Jeffrey Feltman, expressed his concern that the majority of the Muslim world now views the US as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. The president vowed to stop providing Israelis with offensive bombs if they launched a significant invasion into Rafah, a city in the south of the country, last spring. He also told Netanyahu the US was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Israel repeatedly crossed the Biden administration’s red lines, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the US yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than$ 17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently disclosed to Congress a proposed$ 8 billion deal to sell Israeli munitions and artillery shells.

” It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen”, said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on US policy in the region. ” The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it”.

Blinken disputed this in a recent interview with The New York Times, saying that Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. Hasas has resisted agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages, according to Blinken,” when there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure is growing on Israel.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza— which would be a war crime— but Netanyahu relented in response to US pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. He told the Times,” There’s a very different question about what was the intention.”

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The interviews and records reveal why Biden and his top advisers resisted changing his policy despite the release of fresh evidence of Israeli abuses.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the top Middle Eastern diplomats at the organization privately complained that Biden’s National Security Council had hampered them. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of” State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials claimed they were unable to look into allegations of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. ” The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels”, he added. Miller disputed Miller’s claim that the agency has classified information for a reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. UNICEF once reported that at one point in the conflict, more than 10 children on average needed amputations every day. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said,” Our job is to flatten Gaza”.

Israel’s supporters, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the horrifying human trafficking, but claim that American weapons have helped it advance western interests in the area and shield itself from other foes. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups ‘ leaders. Then, late last year, when rebel fighters removed Assad from Syria, Iran’s” axis of resistance” suffered the most severe blow.

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

Lew said,” The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out right away telling a story.” ” It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate.’ 35 children were killed. Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer”.

He continued,” The children who were killed turned out to be the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Polls show Arab Americans are becoming more hostile toward their own government in Muslim-majority nations like Indonesia, the third-largest democracy in the world. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. According to intelligence officials, terrorist organizations are recruiting based on the region’s anti-American sentiment, which they claim is at its highest level in recent memory.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D. C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the US,” two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors”. According to the spokesperson, Israel is a country of laws, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, opening up an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East in the wake of the tragic war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the US government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

One senior diplomat said,” This is the human rights atrocity of our time.” ” I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I consented to this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it”.

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he reaffirmed that if the Israelis succeeded in doing so, the US would stop providing them with offensive weapons.

” It is a red line”, Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the US

Netanyahu still launched an invasion in May. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2, 000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

In response to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its assault on the city in late May. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. In a May 24 email, the lawyers claimed that” there is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold.” While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the US affords Israel.

” The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain,’ Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is”, said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. Rules for thee and not for me

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. Lew claimed in a recent interview that the operation ultimately left fewer civilian casualties than expected. ” It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel”, he added,” but also led to a much better outcome”.

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades as an advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said,” American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it’s convenient.” ” The US does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners”, he added,” not just Israel”.

Miller and others point out that the barbaric Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, sparked bipartisan support for Israel and made it much simpler for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable for their retaliation.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. The only thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation with Israel, Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before taking up her position as House speaker. That rationale aligned with the Democrats ‘ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Officials from the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions created a list of proposed public statements shortly after the ICJ’s order to address the Rafah invasion to state their concern for city residents. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That signaled early on that the State Department was putting policy into the backseat. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year despite the NSC having grown significantly in size and influence over the past few decades.

” The NSC has final say over our messaging”, one diplomat said. ” All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do”.

The NSC did not schedule an interview with its senior leaders or respond to inquiries from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year,” to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

According to Sullivan, there are too many civilian casualties there, and Israel is frequently under both public and private pressure to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. ” We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians”.

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. According to the notes from the conversation, Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to speak up to large crowds about the administration’s Israel policy and that he had taken issue with a lot of it. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. Amr told them that the war has been” catastrophically bad for the US” from a public diplomacy perspective ( Amr did not respond to requests for comment ).

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word” condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians ‘ homes in the West Bank.

Such sanitizing language started to be used frequently. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the US Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. For instance, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem” instead of” Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email,” I would recommend not discussing]international humanitarian law ] at all without extensive clearances”.

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. According to the spokesperson, the list includes the” suggested terms that are in line with US diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. When Israel is accused of violating human rights, the US has looked the other way for decades.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings— or their military assistance would be restricted. The law made it possible to precisely target specific units when they faced credible allegations, preventing the US from having to detach entire nations from US-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, according to records, Israel received special treatment. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. More than two years later, State Department officials wrote a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake, informing the US Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information. ” It is the Department’s conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights”.

Despite numerous allegations made to the State Department, the US government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law despite the fact that the nation has taken action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim, and elsewhere.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. The forum became well known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel, despite its ambitious objectives to finally hold Israeli units accountable.

Current and former diplomats told me that US leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, the experts said, they have developed several processes that appear to be accountable while also undermining any potential outcomes.

” It’s like walking toward the horizon”, said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. ” You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there”.

He continued,” I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and that the State Department was acting in good faith.” ” But both of those things were wrong”.

Even the most famous and ostensibly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole, according to a review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. ” It is indeed very difficult to watch”, a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member stated to coworkers,” I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more information on circumstances of death and whether this would result in Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

Legislators have for years pushed the US government to act on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. He claimed that there is nothing wrong with an Israeli soldier who killed an American journalist. ” They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law”.

A 15-year-old West Bank boy claimed he was tortured and raped at the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiya, or Russian Compound, in a separate case that the forum considered. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1, 100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. The majority of them claimed to have been beaten, and the majority claimed to have been strip searched. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. Children who were so afraid that they urched on themselves during arrests were recalled by IDF soldiers.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. An Israeli policeman then entered the room and beat the other boy to the hilt, he claimed. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

According to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders, Military Court Watch frequently shared its information with the State Department. But nothing ever came of it. ” They receive all our reports and we name the facilities”, he told me. It “enters politics” as it moves up the political cliff. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken”.

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water”.

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. Defense for Children International — Palestine, a nonprofit that had been initially designated a terrorist organization, was raided by the Israeli government the following day.

US human rights officials were therefore told not to speak to DCIP. ” A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations”, said Mike Casey, a former US diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. ” All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them”.

The State Department’s spokesperson, Mark Miller, stated in his statement that the organization has continued to cooperate with organizations in Israel and the West Bank while not “blanketly interfering” with organizations that document human rights abuses.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the US should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation”.

But almost two years passed without any arrests, and participants in the forum struggled to obtain basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

” As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here”, the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. My superiors can dictate to me who I can talk to, according to the Israeli government.

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. The US has not yet shut down the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But he persisted for months on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a chilly January 2022 night, Netzah Yehuda soldiers crossed over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was returning from a game of cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

A dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report, was assembled by DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group presented the document to the Leahy forum at the State Department.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. Additionally, they have been found guilty of abusing and torturing detainees while they are incarcerated.

By late 2023, after the October 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The battalion should no longer receive any American-funded training or weapons until the perpetrators are brought to justice, according to the forum’s advice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. The Israeli Defense Forces “must not be subject to sanctions”! Netanyahu posted on X. The intention to impose sanctions on an IDF unit is both a moral low and the height of absurdity.

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. Blinken punched on an official decision for months. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the US had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. There is no evidence that anyone was charged with a crime, despite two of the soldiers involved being removed from active duty and making them ineligible to serve in the reserve.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

” In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide”, Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement,” I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation”.

The Israeli government stated in a statement to ProPublica that the Israeli government had not examined specific cases, but that it had instead stated that the US administration had thoroughly examined each one, and that Israel had taken appropriate remedial measures.

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. According to a weapons expert, the weapons Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been reportedly pictured holding were likely made in the US.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. ( ProPublica was unable to independently verify the soldiers ‘ units. )

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said,” We won’t leave a trace of them”.

Human Rights Watch reported on November 14 and claimed that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic, and intentional. More than a year after the war started. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing,” Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing”. ( A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation. )

Later that day, reporters inquired about the report’s conclusions with State Department spokesman Vedant Patel during a press briefing.

Patel said the US government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

He continued,” That certainly would be a red line.”

Mariam Elba contributed research. Sign up for ProPublica’s The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Continue Reading