In a rare quiet moment inside the resuscitation room at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, I stood beside a young Palestinian man helping us treat waves of wounded children. He worked with calm precision. Focused. Unflinching.

Then he told me about his brother. Beaten nearly to death by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Not once. Repeatedly. Ribs broken. Face shattered. The attacks ended only when his family fled the land they had farmed for generations.

“They wanted us gone,” he said. Some of the men who carry out this violence hold United States passports.

They live under American law. They vote in American elections. Then they travel abroad and take part in acts that, in any other context, would be recognized without hesitation: assault, arson, organized racial violence. Homes burned. Crops destroyed. Families driven off land.

An American who beats a man because of his ethnicity, drives him from his home, and destroys the means by which his family survives is not transformed into something else by crossing a border.

And then they return. They pass through US customs. They resume their lives. No charges. No investigation. No meaningful consequence.

This is not an abstraction. Human rights organizations, Israeli and international alike, have documented repeated incidents of settler violence in the West Bank: physical attacks on civilians, destruction of agricultural land, the burning of homes and olive groves, often carried out with little immediate accountability.

Some of those involved are Americans. Under US law, citizenship is extraordinarily difficult to revoke. The Supreme Court has made that clear. But citizenship is not the only instrument of accountability, and treating it as such allows something far worse to persist: impunity.

If an American participates in organized violence against civilians abroad, that person should be investigated. If evidence supports it, they should be prosecuted under applicable US law. If their actions meet the threshold of coordinated or systematic violence, then sanctions, asset restrictions, and limits on international travel should follow.

A passport should not function as a safe harbor.

In 2024, the United States took limited steps to sanction........

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