The state department is facing a new lawsuit brought by Palestinians and Palestinian Americans accusing the agency of deliberately circumventing a decades-old US human rights law to continue funding Israeli military units accused of widespread atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, marks the first time that victims of alleged human rights abuses are challenging the state department’s failure to ever sanction an Israeli security unit under the Leahy Law, a 1990s-era law that prohibits US military assistance to forces credibly implicated in gross human rights violations.
