Trump Administration Guts Annual Human Rights Report on Israel
The United States published its annual report on Israeli human rights abuses on Tuesday.
Last year, the State Department published 103 pages on Israel’s “significant human rights issues.” The new report is just nine pages long.
The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents built to soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies and target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed.
The report on Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip was just one of 200 hollowed-out reports on human rights that the State Department released Tuesday, which, as expected, whitewash the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights. Experts said the report on Israel was among the most egregious, with its page count plummeting 91 percent from last year.
While previous editions of the report on Israel — including reports from President Donald Trump’s first term — included significant material on abuses documented by the United Nations and human rights groups, such accounts were mostly omitted from the new report.
“The first Human Rights Report of Secretary Rubio’s tenure can be summarized in just a few more words than it appears to be written in: few truths, many half truths, and nothing like the truth,” said Josh Paul, who spent more than 11 years as the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department bureau that oversees arms transfers to foreign nations before resigning in 2023 over U.S. military assistance to Israel. “Its coverage of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza appears to have been written by someone who has been blindfolded, earmuffed, had a sock stuffed in their mouth, and then censored.”
Last year’s report referenced “significant human........© The Intercept
