Urge U.S. officials to institute guardrails on U.S. arms sales and transfers until a ceasefire deal is back on track

A week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuspoke before Congress andconfirmed to President Joe Biden his commitment to bring home U.S. and Israeli hostages through a ceasefire deal, Ismail Haniyeh, one of Hamas’ lead negotiators, was assassinated in Tehran. Israel is widely believed to have assassinated Haniyeh but has not officially acknowledged responsibility nor denied it. The assassination occurred just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president — and hours afterIsrael confirmed that it had killed a top commander of Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Biden administration has voiced grave concern that these recent killings could ignite a regional war, and the U.S. hassent more vessels and aircraft to the region as a result of the increased risk. The Administration also announced this week theapproval of $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, including F-15 fighter jets, missiles, and tank munitions. 

Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, prime minister of Qatar and a key negotiation mediator in talks,wrote immediately after the news, “Political assassinations and continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?””

Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have died and thousands more have been arrested and held without charges in Israel’s military retaliation for the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 more were taken hostage (110 remain in captivity).
 
 President Biden described the Israeli assassination as “not helpful” to the ceasefire talks — a bewilderingly delicate response to an extrajudicial assassination. Those ceasefire talks aim to bring home both U.S. and Israeli hostages and to end the violence that has taken a tremendous civilian toll. In the days following Haniyeh’s assassination, Netanyahu delegated Israeli officials to attend peace talks in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss the terms (including future Israeli control over the Philadelphi Corridor, which borders Egypt and Gaza’s Rafah border crossing) that Netanyahu had recently appended to terms previously agreed upon. In news that shocked many, those Israeli negotiators — the directors of Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet — have suggested that the prime minister ispurposely sabotaging the ceasefire deal because he is unwilling to say publicly that he no longer supports a ceasefire, upon which the release of Israeli hostages depends.

These events demonstrate a further unraveling of thelong-hoped-for peace deal and askirting of the international criminal justice system. (At the time Haniyeh died, the International Criminal Court was pursuing arrest warrants for him and other Hamas and Israeli leaders.) They occurred only a week after Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, yet Congress has advanced no legislation to increase pressure on the Israeli government to end the violence in Gaza, decrease the risk of famine there or bring home U.S. and Israeli hostages. In fact, Congress has passed legislation to prohibit funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency following reports that nine of its employees (out of some 30,000) may have participated in the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians.

Since that attack, Israeli security forces and Jewish settlers have killed 528 Palestinians in the West Bank, 133 of them children. U.N. human rights officials have warned that the situation is deteriorating dramatically, even as Israel approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades. Human rights organizations have cataloged thousands of Palestinians who have been detained in Israeli prisons without charges, abused and kept in inhumane conditions.

Congress must do more. U.S. legislators must withhold aid to Israel until it adheres to international norms and law — and shows a genuine commitment to pursue peace as eagerly as Netanyahu is now pursuing war. Palestinians, Israelis, Americans and the world depend on U.S. legislators to show meaningful leadership and erect guardrails on the sale and transfer of U.S. arms.

Urge U.S. officials to institute guardrails on U.S. arms sales and transfers until a ceasefire deal is back on track.