Enforce the War Crimes Act Against Americans Who Committed Them In Gaza

Abdelhalim Abdelrahman is a Palestinian-American political analyst, host of the Uncharted Territory Podcast and a Marcellus Policy Fellow alum at the John Quincy Adams Society advocating for a restrained U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East centered around American laws and respect for Palestinian human rights.

Following the October 7th, 2023 attacks, Israel embarked on a series of military operations that human rights organizations, legal experts, and U.N. special rapporteurs recognize as constituting genocide. While allowing a trickle of aid into Gaza, Israel’s government has prevented the United Nations from delivering aid, instead disbursing lifesaving supplies through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), created and backed by the U.S. Department of State and Israel. However, in creating the GHF, Israel and the United States have enabled U.S. security contractors to participate in war crimes alongside the IDF against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

In July 2025, U.S Army Veteran, Anthony Aguilar, blew the whistle on the GHF, reporting he saw both American contractors and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) indiscriminately shooting at Palestinians near aid sites. Aguilar described the aid sites as “death traps” for Palestinians. He is not alone in this assessment. The United Nations estimates that over 850 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed around GHF distribution sites, either by American subcontractors or the IDF. In August, CBS News interviewed another GHF whistleblower under the alias “Mike,” who recounted American subcontractors and IDF deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians near aid sites. 

These subcontractors are not the only U.S. citizens complicit in war crimes in Gaza. The Guardian published a report in September on Daniel Rabb, a U.S.–Israeli citizen from Chicago operating as a sniper in Gaza. Raab is part of the Paratrooper Unit 202, a sniper division of the IDF, for which Raab’s parents helped fundraise over $300,000. 

Under the 1996 War Crimes Act, Congress and the Department of State have the authority to investigate and charge citizens and dual nationals who facilitate war crimes. While federal level action is unlikely under the Trump administration, members of Congress, civil society, and groups leading strategic litigation should press to use U.S. law to hold both the Israeli government and individual perpetrators accountable.

The War Crimes Act

Although the United States’ engagement with international war crimes prosecution is complex, under statutory  law, U.S. nationals can be held domestically accountable for war crimes. The War Crimes Act, passed in 1996 by unanimous consent in the Senate and voice vote in the House, criminalizes a range of conduct constituting “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, when committed by U.S. nationals or members of the U.S. armed forces. The scope of the WCA is significant: conduct committed overseas is not exempt from prosecution under U.S. law if the perpetrator is an American national.

Conduct by U.S. citizens and dual nationals in Gaza, like firing on civilians, could constitute a “grave breach” under the Geneva Conventions. This offers a legal basis for the Department of Justice to open WCA investigations against American subcontractors with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or citizens serving in IDF units plausibly to be committing war crimes.

The DOJ should immediately create a War Crimes Task Force, which would actively investigate credible allegations of war crimes committed by U.S citizens subcontracted by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, along with American-Israelis serving in the IDF. This task force should have expertise in international humanitarian law, open-source forensics, and conflict-zone investigations. This step would make clear that American citizenship is not a means to evade responsibility, and would allow the U.S. government to enforce the War Crimes Act to help prevent future impunity. Such an effort would also likely clear the path for a long-overdue accounting of war crimes committed by people serving in the US military, such as the 151 cases uncovered by The New Yorker and the Pulitzer Center in 2024.

Disarming Dangerous ‘Allies’

While the War Crimes Act allows for charges to be brought against perpetrators, the State Department and Department of Defense are obliged under the Leahy Laws to prevent continued military aid to foreign military units “where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”. There is potential for overlap: if an American is serving in a foreign military unit committing abuses, they could be charged under the War Crimes Act, and their unit should be flagged for rigorous vetting under the Leahy Laws, though the crimes need not overlap for either measure to be useful.

The Leahy Laws offer another tool to prevent the use of American weapons in human rights abuses. Initially passed in 1997, and expanded/reaffirmed since, the Leahy Laws prohibit U.S. security assistance to any foreign security force unit “about which” credible information exists of gross violations of human rights, including but not limited to torture, extrajudicial killing, and enforced disappearance. The Leahy laws prevent specific military aid from continuing to be provided to units found in violation, but the laws do not at present ensure such units are barred from receiving assistance given to the foreign country’s military as a whole, after which the distribution of that aid makes it non-traceable, and can leave it in the hands of specific units that violate human rights. Patrick Leahy, the former Senator whose name the Leahy laws bear, argued in spring 2024 that the laws should be applied to Israel. “Unlike for most countries,” he wrote, “U.S. weapons, ammunition and other aid are provided to Israeli security forces in bulk rather than to specific units. The secretary of state is therefore required to regularly inform Israel of any security force unit ineligible for U.S. aid because of having committed a gross violation of human rights, and the Israeli government is obligated to comply with that prohibition.”

To date, the Leahy Laws have been used to impede funding to suspect units in Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt, Ukraine, and elsewhere, but as Leahy himself noted, since “the Leahy law was passed, not a single Israeli security force unit has been deemed ineligible for U.S. aid, despite repeated, credible reports of gross violations of human rights and a pattern of failing to appropriately punish Israeli soldiers and police who violate the rights of Palestinians.”

Congress and State should end that double standard. Accountability and integrity under US law demands that the Leahy conditions should be upheld in every instance, even and especially when friends and allies commit war crimes. 

Daniel Raab’s Israeli Sniper Unit 202 should be subject to rigorous Leahy Law vetting, reasserting that U.S. military assistance—training, intelligence, equipment, etc.— can and will be withdrawn on credible allegations of unlawful attacks. Other units responsible for war crimes, like the targeting of civilians, should be identified in the open source or news reporting and similarly be made ineligible for U.S support under the Leahy Laws.

Policy Recommendations 

Congress must do its job to ensure oversight and transparency. It should require the State Department to make regular public reports on investigations of U.S. nationals under the War Crimes Act, as well as the results of Leahy vetting. Congress can and should hold oversight hearings to demand the executive branch take action (or explain its inaction) when such violations come to light. The U.S. government should coordinate with U.N. fact-finding missions, NGOs, and international prosecutors and share evidence it has that can be used to corroborate allegations. It should be absolutely clear, through public messaging by the State Department, that U.S. nationals are not exempt from accountability mechanisms for violations committed anywhere.

As the second anniversary of October 7 passes, and the tenuous terms of a ceasefire are once again agreed to, the genocide in Gaza remains a humanitarian and legal crisis. American citizens and nationals have been directly implicated in the violence, raising profound questions of accountability. Washington possesses legal tools, like the War Crimes Act, and legally mandated procedural obligations, like arms withholding under Leahy Laws—but has lacked the political and moral courage to utilize them. Enforcing these statutes, such as conditioning aid, arms embargoes and enhancing transparency, are essential steps toward upholding international law, deterring future violations, and ensuring that American citizenship is never misused as a shield for war crimes. 

The United States cannot credibly demand accountability for atrocities in other conflicts (e.g Russian war crimes in Ukraine) while it simultaneously shields American GHF subcontractors and possibly other IDF dual nationals complicit in war crimes in Gaza

If serving in a foreign military is a free pass to immunity, then citizenship, and by extension the law, loses meaning. The U.S. must not create that precedent. The threat, however small, of prosecution or conditioned assistance will have a deterrent effect: knowing that one’s military actions may later have legal and reputational consequences will push compliance with IHL. 

While the present administration may disregard the harm done to national reputation as undermining U.S. strategic interest, unaddressed accusations of grave human rights violations by U.S. citizens abroad carries real diplomatic risk for Washington. Ignoring it erodes trust with allies and partners that expect and demand the U.S. to uphold its own laws.