US to continue funding Israeli military unit accused of gross human rights abuses

The US State Department made the determination, according to several reports, after reviewing new information about the Netzah Yehuda battalion from the Israeli government.

That information showed Washington that Israel “remediated the behaviour of the battalion and addressed US concerns”, a senior US official told Axios.

Earlier this year, Axios reported that the US was planning to sanction the Israeli unit under a 1997 law named after former Senator Patrick Leahy. The law denies US aid or training to foreign military or security units found to have committed “gross violations of human rights”.

The Netzah Yehuda was first formed in 1999 and back then was only comprised of 30 Israeli soldiers. It now has around 1,000 troops and operates in the occupied West Bank cities of Ramallah and Jenin.

The all-male military unit, made up of volunteers and not conscripts, was established to accommodate the religious needs of ultra-Orthodox Haredi men who are exempt from military conscription.

The unit excludes non-Jews, has strict religious dietary regulations, and maintains strict gender segregation.

“The battalion attracts Religious Zionists, who combine Jewish religious interpretations with nationalist militarism,” Marwa Maziad, a professor of Israel studies at the University of Maryland, previously told Middle East Eye.

In January 2022, the Netzah Yehuda sparked international outrage after Palestinian-American Omar Muhammad Assad, 80, died of a heart attack following a violent detention at the hands of their troops.

Eyewitnesses said Assad was handcuffed, gagged and forced to lie on his stomach, before being left in that position by the departing Israeli soldiers. He was later found by the side of the road and pronounced dead from cardiac arrest.

But the allegations don’t stop there. The battalion already had a long history of violent abuses against Palestinians.

In 2015, a soldier from the unit shot an unarmed Palestinian near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

In 2021, four Netzah Yehuda soldiers were held over the alleged beating and sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee.

At that time, reports also began to emerge of five soldiers from the unit physically assaulting and arbitrarily detaining Shadi al-Ghobaishi, a Palestinian civilian from the Jalazone refugee camp in Ramallah.