‘Taxpayers Deserve Answers’: US Senate Urged to Support Bill to Spotlight Israeli Abuses in West Bank

Por Jake Johnson — Common Dreams

The US Senate is expected to vote as soon as Tuesday evening on a resolution that would require the Trump administration to produce an official report on Israel’s human rights practices in the illegally occupied West Bank, where the US-backed Israeli government is engaging in large-scale land confiscations, displacing Palestinians en masse, and enabling deadly settler violence.

The Senate measure, known as S.Res.852, cites Section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to formally request “an unclassified statement” from the US State Department “regarding Israel’s human rights practices.” The filibuster-proof resolution, led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), notes that at least nine Palestinian Americans have been killed by Israeli settlers or security forces in the West Bank since 2022, and that “Israeli military authorities have detained, interrogated, prosecuted, and imprisoned approximately 13,000 Palestinian children” since 2000.

If passed by the Senate, Van Hollen’s resolution would require the State Department to produce a report within 30 days on the Israeli government’s human rights conduct in the West Bank. Some US military assistance to Israel would be frozen if the State Department failed to issue the mandated report by the deadline.

Following release of the potential State Department’s report, “the Congress may at any time thereafter adopt a joint resolution terminating, restricting, or continuing security assistance for such country,” according to the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits US military aid to any country that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Cavan Kharrazian, senior policy adviser with the advocacy group Demand Progress, urged senators to back Van Hollen’s resolution, saying that “US taxpayers deserve answers about what happened and what our government is doing to prevent its military aid from fueling human rights violations and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.”

“We know that Americans have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers and that Palestinian children face detention and abuse in Israeli military custody,” said Kharrazian. “Demanding transparency and enforcing US laws governing military aid should be the bare minimum for any senator. This resolution is a long-overdue first step. Every senator should support it, then follow through by supporting resolutions to block any new arms sales to Israel.”

Amnesty International USA also expressed support for the resolution, saying in a Monday statement that it “provides an important opportunity to press the Trump administration on its policies and the lack of accountability for the Israeli government’s human rights abuses and violations of international law.”

“This vote comes at a critical juncture in the occupied Palestinian territory as Israel continues its ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in the West Bank,” said Elizabeth Rghebi, the group’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa. “This campaign must also be understood as occurring within a broader context of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, illegal occupation, and an apartheid system over all Palestinians.”

Last year, the Trump State Department—led by Marco Rubio—issued a sparse report on Israel’s human rights practices that said nothing about Israel’s annexation efforts, home demolitions, aiding of settler violence, and other abuses in the occupied West Bank.

Far from working to mitigate Israeli atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Trump administration is actively fueling them. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that the administration is planning to send Israel tens of thousands of additional 2,000-pound bombs in what the newspaper described as “the largest single sale of the controversial munition in recent years.”

“For years, the US has failed to get justice for Americans—those killed in the West Bank and detained by the Israeli government—or accountability for Palestinians who are being brutalized with the government’s complicity,” Van Hollen wrote in a social media post on Monday. “This week I will force a vote on this resolution to get answers.”

Fonte: Common Dreams