The Leahy Law

Omar Assad spent most of his life in Milwaukee. He was 78 when he went back to Jiljilya, the West Bank village north of Ramallah where he was born, and on the night of January 12, 2022, he was stopped at a checkpoint on his way home.

Soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda battalion bound his hands with a plastic tie, gagged him, and left him face down on the ground at a construction site. A Palestinian autopsy found he had a history of heart trouble and died of stress-induced cardiac arrest. He was an American citizen.

There is a federal statute written for exactly this circumstance. It has been on the books since 1997, it is enforced against American partners around the world every year, and in this instance it did nothing at all.

What the law says

The Leahy Law is named for Patrick Leahy, the Vermont senator who wrote it. It exists in two places, Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act for State Department programs and Title 10 Section 362 for Defense Department programs, and the operative rule is short.

No unit of a foreign security force may receive U.S. assistance if the Secretary of State has credible information that it committed a gross violation of human rights. The statute names them: torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, rape.

The prohibition attaches to the unit, not to the country. That design is the whole point of the law. It lets the United States keep a security relationship intact while refusing to fund the specific battalion that tortured someone. Aid resumes if the government takes effective steps to bring the responsible members to justice.

This is not an obscure provision. Units in Bangladesh, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Guatemala, Indonesia and elsewhere have been cut off under it. Colombia’s army had units vetted out over the false positives scandal, in which soldiers killed civilians and presented them as guerrillas. Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion was walled off from American training and equipment. The machinery works, and American diplomats use it.

The process built for one country

In 2020 the State Department created something it has for no other nation on earth: a separate body, the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to handle Israeli cases under their own procedures.

Charles Blaha ran Leahy vetting at the State Department for seven and a half years as director of the Office of Security and Human Rights. His description of how the Israeli process differs from every other one is the most authoritative account available, and it is worth setting out plainly.

Everywhere else, career experts work through cases at the working level and agree a list of ineligible units with the country in question. For Israel, only the Deputy Secretary of State can determine that a unit is ineligible. That authority sits nowhere near that level for any other country. Cases cannot advance until a formal written demarche has gone to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which takes weeks or months. Periodic high-level in-person meetings replace the expert-level process used elsewhere.

The result of all that procedure is a number, and the number is zero. In more than four years the forum has never approved the identification of a single ineligible Israeli unit.

Congress anticipated part of this. A 2019 amendment addressed assistance where the receiving unit cannot be identified in advance, requiring the Secretary of State to regularly give the recipient government a list of units barred from receiving it, and to obtain written agreement that the government will comply.

Blaha’s account of how that has gone: “The State Department has never delivered a list of ineligible Israeli units to the government of Israel. Not once.”

May 2024

By early 2024 the forum’s own experts had escalated. They sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken multiple cases with recommendations to cut units off, which after years of deferential handling was an unusual thing for the career staff to do.

On May 10, 2024, Blinken decided four of them. He accepted that the units had committed gross violations of human rights and concluded that Israel had remediated them adequately, leaving all four eligible for American assistance.

One of those cases involved a soldier of the Shahar battalion who killed an unarmed Palestinian. His punishment was three months of community service and a three-month suspended sentence.

Tim Rieser, the longtime Leahy aide who helped write the law, said community service is “not what would be considered appropriate punishment.” Blaha, who had spent seven years deciding exactly these questions, was blunter. He called it “an outrage and another example of special treatment for Israel,” and said his office “never would have accepted it as adequate remediation” from any other country. There are, he said, “literally dozens of Israeli security force units” credibly implicated in gross violations that remain eligible for American aid.

Netzah Yehuda, the battalion that detained Omar Assad, was handled separately after the Israeli government pushed back hard against any designation. Blinken kept it eligible, saying the department was engaging with Israel on identifying a path to effective remediation. That phrase does not appear in the statute. The statute makes a unit ineligible when the credible information exists, and restores eligibility after effective steps are taken, not before.

In August 2024 the State Department confirmed Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off. Israel’s military had reprimanded a commander and removed two officers from their posts. In June 2023 it had already announced that no one would face criminal charges over Assad’s death.

The government’s position

The State Department’s defense is that the law is being followed rather than evaded. Israel, on this account, has an independent judiciary and a functioning military justice system, which is precisely the circumstance in which the statute contemplates remediation rather than cutoff. Investigations were opened, findings were made, officers were disciplined. Determining whether that is adequate is a judgment the statute assigns to the Secretary of State, and Blinken made it.

Supporters add that Israel faces an operational environment few American partners do, and that its own legal system reviews these incidents to a degree many recipients of U.S. aid never approach.

Those points are real. What they do not explain is the architecture. A country whose justice system is genuinely capable of handling these cases would have the least need for a bespoke vetting forum, a decision authority elevated to the Deputy Secretary, a mandatory diplomatic notification before any case can move, and four years without a single designation.

Why it matters

Almost every case in this archive requires the reader to weigh evidence. This one mostly requires arithmetic.

There is a law. It is applied to Colombia, to Nigeria, to Bangladesh, to Mexico. For one country the State Department built a different process, staffed it differently, raised the decision to a rank used nowhere else, and has produced no designations in over four years while its own experts were recommending them.

And the case that put the statute in the news was the death of a 78-year-old man from Milwaukee, bound and gagged at a checkpoint, whose American citizenship changed nothing about the outcome. No one was charged. The unit kept its funding.

The law was written so that American taxpayers would not underwrite units that torture and kill. It works as intended in most of the world. The record here is that a statute of general application was given a private door, and that everyone involved knew what the door was for.

Sources

• Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, Section 620M, and 10 U.S.C. § 362, the State and Defense Department Leahy provisions, including the 2019 amendment on unidentifiable recipient units
• Charles Blaha, “Israel and the Leahy Law,” Just Security, 2024, and “The State Department’s Wrong Decision to Exempt IDF Unit from Leahy Law Ineligibility,” Just Security, 2024. Blaha directed the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights and ran Leahy vetting for seven and a half years
• ProPublica, “Blinken Says Israeli Units Accused of Serious Violations Have Done Enough to Avoid Sanctions. Experts and Insiders Disagree,” 2024, and related ProPublica reporting on the recommendations sent to the Secretary
• BBC News, “Palestinian-American Man, 78, Found Dead After Israeli Raid in West Bank,” January 2022
• Associated Press, “Israel Punishes Officers in Death of Palestinian-American Who Lived in Milwaukee,” 2022
• Reporting on the Israeli military’s June 2023 decision not to bring criminal charges, and on the State Department’s August 2024 confirmation that Netzah Yehuda would remain eligible
• Congressional Research Service and Open Society Foundations background on Leahy Law application to Colombia, Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria and other recipients
• DAWN, litigation seeking release of Israel Leahy Vetting Forum records