A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

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Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department's conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

Mariam Elba contributed research.