US Report on Israeli Rights Abuses Sharply Reduced

The United States published its annual report on Israeli human rights abuses on Tuesday.

Last year, the State Department published 103 pages on Israel’s “significant human rights issues.” The new report is just nine pages long.

The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents built to soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies and target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed.

The report on Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip was just one of 200 hollowed-out reports on human rights that the State Department released Tuesday, which, as expected, whitewash the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights. Experts said the report on Israel was among the most egregious, with its page count plummeting 91 percent from last year.

While previous editions of the report on Israel — including reports from President Donald Trump’s first term — included significant material on abuses documented by the United Nations and human rights groups, such accounts were mostly omitted from the new report.

Last year’s report referenced “significant human rights issues” – language which is absent from the report released on Tuesday. The report also omits reference to the genocide case that Israel faces at the International Court of Justice over its war on Gaza. Also absent is mention of the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The section on war crimes and genocide only states: “Terrorist organizations Hamas and Hizballah continue to engage in the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians in violation of the law of armed conflict.”

“Although the Biden administration continued to provide essentially unconditional support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the 2023 Human Rights Report on Israel/Palestine documented a large number of Israel’s significant human rights violations,” said Annelle Sheline, who served as a foreign affairs officer in the Office of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor until last year and previously worked on annual country human rights reports. “In contrast, for 2024 — a year characterized by Israel killing likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in an indiscriminate campaign of bombing and starvation, in direct violation of U.S. law — the Human Rights Report documents almost none of Israel’s human rights abuses, focusing instead almost exclusively on abuses committed by Hamas.”

Paul, the former State Department official, noted that the new report “suggests that scores of journalists have been killed ‘due to the Israel-Hamas conflict’ — rather than, as is the case, ‘by Israel’ — while also reporting with a straight face Israel’s claim that ‘a number of individuals who posed as journalists … were members of or had direct ties to Hamas and other terrorists in Gaza.’”

On Sunday, Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed alongside several other colleagues in a targeted Israeli attack on a tent housing journalists in Gaza City. The Al Jazeera Media Network condemned the killings as “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom.”

The section on torture in this year’s report on Israel focuses on the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of Israeli hostages by Hamas. Regarding torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israel, the report says, “Shin Bet (the Israel Security Agency) and police used violent interrogation methods that it referred to as ‘exceptional measures,’ but the Ministry of Justice did not provide information regarding the frequency of interrogations or the specific interrogation methods used.” Last year’s report referred to “reports of systemic torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment of Palestinian detainees in prison facilities after October 7.”

“This contrast demonstrates most clearly that from the perspective of the Trump administration, if a U.S. partner abuses human rights, Washington does not care,” said Sheline, who also resigned, in March 2024, to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “This will have implications far beyond the actions of Israel’s murderous regime, contributing to all U.S. security partners knowing they can abuse their populations with impunity.”

“The Human Rights Reports have been among the U.S. Government’s most-read documents,” said Charles Blaha, a 32-year State Department official and now senior adviser to DAWN, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. “This year, the Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Reports’ significant omissions render them functionally useless for Congress and the public as nothing more than a pro-Israel document.”