The State Department is being sued by Palestinian families for supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has resulted in a humanitarian crisis in the confined territory and killed tens of thousands of people.
Plaintiffs from Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and the United States filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, accusing Washington of making exceptions for its close ally Israel in order to get around the 1997 Leahy law, which forbids foreign military aid in cases where there is proof of human rights violations.
In a statement released by the legal nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, which assisted in bringing the lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs, Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American, said, “My surviving family members in Gaza have been forcibly displaced four times since October, living in constant fear of indiscriminate Israeli attacks carried out with American weapons.”
Moor, one of the case’s five plaintiffs, continued, “These Israeli harms to me and my family are being made possible by the U.S. government’s military assistance to these abusive Israeli forces, which our own laws prohibit.”
The State Department has been contacted by NBC News for comment.
Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the State Department, stated on Tuesday that he was unaware of the case, but in any case, I would refer it to the Department of Justice, which usually asks us to refrain from commenting on matters that they will need to address in court.
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