Washington will not go ahead with punitive actions it has been considering against Israeli military and police units alleged to have committed human rights violations against Palestinians, including the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, according to an ABC News report on Friday.
While the Biden administration has determined “gross human rights violations” were committed by Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the report, the relevant battalions will remain eligible for United States military aid.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shared the assessment in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, ABC reported, in which he wrote that the position “will not delay the delivery of any US assistance and Israel will be able to receive the full amount appropriated by Congress.”
However, despite the report, it is believed that there wasn’t a final decision yet, and that process is still ongoing.
Earlier this week, US President Joe Biden signed into law a $95 billion war aid measure that included assistance for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The legislation will send $17 billion in wartime assistance to Israel and $9 billion in humanitarian relief to citizens of Gaza and other war-torn regions — with Biden specifying at a White House event to announce the signing on Wednesday that the package “includes $1 billion for additional humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
The ABC report noted that allegations of rights abuses by IDF units took place before war erupted in Gaza on October 7, with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 253.
It also noted that none of the cases involved “operations against Hamas in Gaza or against Iran or its proxies.”
The reports earlier this week that said the US would take action against Netzah Yehuda were strongly condemned by Israeli leadership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and other ministers in the government publicly calling on the US not to go ahead with the sanctions.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials, including Gallant and war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, held separate talks with Blinken this week in an effort to prevent Washington from going ahead with slapping sanctions on Netzah Yehuda, a Kfir infantry brigade battalion designed for religious troops that is largely comprised of ultra-Orthodox nationalists.
The consideration to sanction Netzah Yehuda came following a State Department probe into the battalion and several of the others in the Israeli security forces for well over a year due to alleged human rights violations.
The battalion has been at the center of several controversies in the past connected to right-wing extremism and violence against Palestinians, notably including the 2022 death of Omar As’ad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American who died after being detained, handcuffed, blindfolded and later abandoned in near-freezing conditions by soldiers of the battalion.
Following this incident and other reports of alleged abuse Palestinians suffered at the hands of the battalion’s soldiers, the IDF decided to move it out of the West Bank in December 2022 so they would no longer be in contact with Palestinians.
No steps were taken, however, to hold specific soldiers accountable for the repeated incidents of misconduct against Palestinians that ran rampant in Netzah Yehuda, a US official told The Times of Israel earlier this week, explaining the unprecedented decision to consider sanctioning an Israeli military unit.