US to announce sanctions against IDF unit

Washington expected to prohibit transfer of military aid to haredi Netzah Yehuda Battalion

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions against the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda Battalion in the next few days, according to three American sources.

The sanctions are a result of alleged human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank.

This will be the first time that the United States government has imposed sanctions on an Israeli military unit for its activities in the West Bank.

The sources stated that the

American sanctions will prohibit the transfer of US military aid to the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, will prevent its soldiers and officers from taking part in training with the United States military, and will prevent the soldiers from this unit from participating in activities that receive American funding.

The sanctions are based on a 1997 law by former Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, which prohibits the United States from providing military aid or training to security forces, the military, or the police when there is reliable information about human rights abuses.

A senior US administration official told Walla that Blinken’s decision is based on incidents that occurred before October 7 and occurred only in the West Bank.

This was the only unit Blinken decided to sanction.

One of the sources stated that Blinken decided not to impose sanctions on several additional units in the IDF and the Israel Police that were also under investigation because they had corrected their conduct.

On Thursday, the American investigative website ProPublica

reported that a special committee of the American State Department, which investigated allegations of human rights violations in the West Bank, forwarded recommendations a few months ago to Blinken to impose sanctions on several units of the IDF and the Israel Police and to prevent them from receiving American funding.

At a press conference in Italy on Friday, Blinken was asked about these recommendations, and claimed that he had made a decision on the matter and that an announcement about it would be made in the coming days.

The Netzah Yehuda Battalion was originally established as a special military unit for haredim (ultra-Orthodox), in which all of the soldiers and officers were men.

Over the years, in light of the low number of haredim who enlisted in the IDF, the unit also began to include extremist youth who held far-right positions and were not included in other combat units in the IDF.

Journalist Amos Harel reported in Haaretz in September 2022 that the US State Department began an investigation into the Netzah Yehuda Battalion following several incidents in which soldiers from the battalion were involved in violence against Palestinian civilians.

One of these incidents included Omar Asad, an 80-year-old Palestinian-American, who died in January 2022.

Asad was arrested in his village near Ramallah at a sudden checkpoint set up by soldiers from Netzah Yehuda. After resisting the search, he was handcuffed, his mouth was gagged, and the soldiers left him on the ground in the middle of the night. A few hours later, he was found dead.

After an investigation into the incident, the IDF stated that there was “a moral failure of the forces and an error in judgment, while seriously harming the value of human dignity.”

Following the incident, the commander of the Netzah Yehuda Battalion was reprimanded, and the company commander and the platoon commander of the soldiers were immediately dismissed. The criminal investigation opened against the soldiers was closed without prosecution.