Abdul El-Sayed said US aid to Israel violates Leahy laws. What are they, and is he right?
PolitiFact ·
After campaigning to end U.S. aid to Israel, Michigan’s U.S. Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed found a rare point of agreement with President Donald Trump.
El-Sayed, a Democrat, said in a CNN interview he agrees with Trump’s call to end $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. El-Sayed said he wants to take that further and prohibit all weapons transfers to Israel.
“I don’t know why we are engaged in weapons transfers against the Leahy laws, our own policy, with a government that has engaged in war crimes and the worst with our weapons,” El-Sayed said Nov. 5.
The Leahy laws prohibit the federal government from providing military assistance or training to foreign security forces credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights. They’re named after former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who introduced the laws in the 1990s.
El-Sayed has a point: Human rights experts have said the U.S. has essentially ignored the Leahy requirements for Israel funding and slow-walked investigations to avoid sanctioning Israeli forces.
The U.S. government has never used the law to restrict aid to Israel’s military, despite State Department-documented evidence of human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers. The Leahy law process for investigating alleged human rights abuses by Israeli forces, however, is opaque and marked by frequent delays . Critics say the U.S. has given special treatment to Israel despite the law.
The U.S. provides about $3.8 billion in annual aid to Israel, and Trump provided little detail about how he would phase it out.
If that aid does end, Israel could continue buying weapons from the U.S., which would not be subject to Leahy rules.
The Leahy laws apply to both the State Department and the Defense Department. Leahy law violations include “torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, and rape,” according to the State Department .
If the secretary of state determines that the foreign government has addressed the conduct, the U.S. can resume its assistance. The U.S. government can also continue sending military funding to a country and its other military units, even if a unit in the country becomes ineligible. The law doesn’t apply to weapons purchases made with the foreign country’s money, rather than U.S. aid.
The U.S. has a unique process for ensuring Israel military aid follows the Leahy laws that critics have called secretive and ineffective.
Most military funding to Israel isn’t traceable to a specific military unit. For nontraceable funding like that, Congress updated the Leahy laws in 2019 to require the secretary of state to create a list of foreign military and police units that aren’t eligible for funding. The department must provide the list to the foreign government receiving funding and work with it to ensure that the funding doesn’t reach those groups.
In response to that change, the State Department in 2020 established the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum — a panel of Middle East and human rights experts in the State Department — to investigate potential human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers and determine eligibility for U.S. military funding. Yet, the panel appears to have moved slowly. The State Department’s inspector general found in 2025, two years after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, that the panel had not finalized standard operating procedures, which led to delays in investigating and deciding on potential human rights abuses by Israeli units.
The report said it would take 12.5 years for the panel to go through the backlog of alleged violations. The report did not say how far back the cases go, but it said the human rights abuse allegations have grown since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. These delays and lack of clear rules “raised the risk that security assistance could be provided to an ineligible unit,” the report said.
The U.S. government has never publicly said an Israeli military group is ineligible for aid under the law, and there’s no record it has provided a list of ineligible units to Israel. Charles Blaha, who oversaw the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights from 2016 to 2023, said the failure to provide a list of ineligible units to Israel violates the Leahy law.
“What all this shows is that the State Department is violating the law by basically refusing to adjudicate units for Israel,” he said.
Blaha is a senior adviser for DAWN, a human rights advocacy organization focused on the Middle East. DAWN is involved in an ongoing lawsuit accusing the U.S. State Department of violating the Leahy law by not investigating violations or providing a list of ineligible units to Israel.
“This is mostly an issue of law, but one where most experts and Leahy Law authorities agree that the Leahy Law has not been applied to Israel in the manner that it is normally applied to other countries,” said John Ramming Chappell, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy.
The State Department under President Joe Biden said it applied the same standards to Israel as other countries under Leahy laws. Lawyers for the State Department under Trump have argued that decisions about cutting off aid are under the secretary of state’s discretion. A State Department spokesperson told PolitiFact the department is continuing to implement the Leahy laws, and did not provide additional details.
Under President Joe Biden, the State Department announced in 2024 that it had found five Israeli units had committed gross human rights violations in incidents before the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023.
Department officials said four units had addressed the violations, and a fifth — the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda Battalion — was in the process. There was no pause in weapons transfers, and Netzah Yehuda wasn’t formally sanctioned.
The four resolved incidents involved cases of extrajudicial killing and rape, with punishments ranging from long prison sentences to community service.
The Netzah Yehuda incident involved the death of 78-year-old Omar Assad , an American citizen and Palestinian. In 2022, soldiers detained Assad in the West Bank and left him bound and gagged at a construction site, where he died of a heart attack. Two officers were disciplined, but no one was charged.
Blaha wrote in a 2024 article that the State Department wouldn’t consider the response to the Netzah Yehuda incident as adequate remediation if it were done by another country.
Leahy, who left the Senate in 2023, criticized the State Department’s handling of those cases in 2024. He said the State Department’s ruling that only five Israeli security forces had committed gross human rights violations “makes a mockery of the law.”
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