The US held off sanctioning this Israeli army unit despite evidence of abuses. Now its forces are shaping the fight in Gaza

By CNN’s International Investigations team

(CNN) — Former commanders of the Netzah Yehuda battalion, an Israeli military unit that has been accused by the United States of gross human rights violations against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank prior to October 7, have been promoted to senior positions in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and are now active in training Israeli ground troops as well as running operations in Gaza, a CNN investigation has found.

Among CNN’s findings was rare whistleblower testimony from a former soldier of the unit who described a command that encouraged a culture of violence, an issue identified by US State Department investigations.

In April, the State Department said that it had determined five Israeli security units had committed gross violations of human rights prior to the outbreak of the war with Hamas in Gaza. The department said that four of the units had “effectively remediated,” or reformed themselves, in the wake of those violations, but that it was still deciding whether to restrict US military assistance to the remaining unit: The Netzah Yehuda battalion, originally created to accommodate ultra-Orthodox Jews in the military.

The news that the US might withhold assistance from the Israeli military unit triggered a furious response at the time from top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said: “If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, I will fight with all my strength.”

In a letter obtained by CNN, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told House Speaker Mike Johnson that the US was working with Israel “on identifying a path to effective remediation” for the Netzah Yehuda battalion. The letter did not name the unit, but current and former US officials confirmed to CNN that Blinken was referring to Netzah Yehuda, which has been accused of a string of abuses in the occupied West Bank over the last 10 years, including in the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian-American man in 2022.

Using facial recognition technology and other open-source techniques, CNN has found that three former commanders of the Netzah Yehuda battalion – who were in charge of the unit at the time of alleged abuses in the West Bank – have risen through the ranks of the IDF. CNN tracked these commanders by matching their faces to publicly available imagery over the years, ranging from photographs of military ceremonies to battlefield updates.

CNN has spoken with a former member of the unit, who detailed instances of cruel and excessively violent treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The whistleblower said that commanders actively supported vigilante violence and that promoting them into senior IDF positions risked bringing the same culture to other parts of the military.

“A lot of us probably did not see Arabs, Palestinians in particular, as someone with rights – okay, like they’re really the occupier of some of the land and they need to be moved,” he said.

The former soldier, who asked not to be named due to fears about his security, told CNN that the unit was well known for carrying out what he described as the “collective punishment of Palestinians.” He gave an example of the battalion’s forces assaulting a Palestinian village, going door-to-door with stun grenades and gas grenades as retribution for some local children throwing rocks.

While he was in Netzah Yehuda, he said, the battalion’s commanders played a key role in perpetuating a culture of violence, both by standing by as it happened and promoting it.

Responding to CNN’s request for comment on the allegations of abuse by Netzah Yehuda, the IDF said that the battalion “operates in a professional and ethical manner” and that its soldiers and commanders “act according to the orders and protocols expected of soldiers in the IDF.” The IDF added that it investigates “every exceptional incident,” and takes command and disciplinary measures against those involved when appropriate. It did not comment on the subsequent promotion of some commanders.

In the course of its month-long investigation, CNN spoke with several current and former US officials, who revealed the intense frustrations within the Biden administration at the perceived special treatment that Israel receives from the US when it comes to addressing human rights violations by its security forces. The former US officials said the fact that Netzah Yehuda’s former commanders have continued to be promoted through Israel’s military ranks was a worrying result of America’s inaction and could have devastating consequences.

The US determined that four of the five Israeli units under scrutiny were remediated on the basis that Israel had taken steps to “bring to justice” responsible service members, according to an internal memo sent by the State Department to Congress and obtained by CNN. Israeli military veterans from Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group, told CNN that the IDF often scapegoats junior soldiers or officers, arguing that abuses are the fault of a few bad apples rather than reflective of institutional problems stemming from longstanding military practices or government policies. That approach should not meet the bar for effective remediation, US officials said.

A State Department spokesperson told CNN that they do not discuss the circumstances of individual cases, but its experts had “concluded that several Israeli security force units were credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights (GVHRs),” and that for four of those, the Israeli government had “taken effective steps to bring those responsible to justice.”

“We continue to assess reports of GVHRs by Israeli security forces, in accordance with the law, and all US security assistance to Israel is provided consistent with domestic and international law,” the spokesperson added.

Current and former US officials also told CNN that the five Israeli units were not the only ones the State Department had been examining. The special State Department panel had reached unanimous consensus at a working level that three additional units had been guilty of abuses prior to October 7, the officials said. Only Blinken or the Deputy Secretary of State can make a final determination on whether units remain eligible to receive US military assistance and it is unclear if the matter has come before them. The findings by the expert panel would have been enough to disqualify a military unit from any other country, the officials said.

The incidents include the killing of Ahmad Jamil Fahd, who was allegedly shot by forces from the Israeli police counterterrorism unit, the Yamam, near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, in May 2021; the killing of a Bedouin man identified as Sanad Salaam al-Harbad, who was allegedly shot by the Israel Border Police in the southern Israeli city of Rahat in March 2022; and the alleged rape of a 15-year-old boy by an interrogator from the Israeli Internal Security Forces at the Russian Compound (Moscobiyya detention center) in Jerusalem in January 2021. One US official CNN spoke with said these were among “the most flagrant abuses looked into.”

CNN reached out to the Israel Border Police and Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security agency, for comment on the State Department’s findings.

Josh Paul, who as a former director in the State Department’s political-military affairs bureau spent more than 11 years working on US defense diplomacy, security and weapons assistance before resigning in October 2023 over the transfer of arms to Israel, told CNN that there was “not even the slightest basis” to suggest that the three further units identified to CNN — the Yamam, the Israel Border Police and Internal Security Forces connected to the Moscobiyya detention center — had done anything to reform.

Paul had previously referenced the Moscobiyya rape allegation in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, adding that a charity had drawn it to the attention of a State Department vetting panel he was on. The allegation was believed to be credible and raised with Israel’s government, he said. “And do you know what happened the next day? The IDF went in to the (charity’s) offices and removed all their computers and declared them a terrorist entity,” he told Amanpour.

Two of the units have been linked to deadly incidents in the wake of October 7. The Yamam was involved in Israel’s hostage rescue operation in Nuseirat refugee camp, in northern Gaza, on June 8, which freed four Israelis and, according to local health authorities, killed more than 270 Palestinians and injured over 700. The IDF has disputed those numbers, claiming that casualties from the operation were “under 100.” CNN cannot independently verify the casualty figures given by either side. Meanwhile, the Israel Border Police shot and killed a 3-year-old Palestinian girl in the occupied West Bank in January and a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in occupied east Jerusalem in March.

The fact that the US has never imposed sanctions on any Israeli military unit shows “the lack of political will and moral courage to hold Israel accountable,” Paul added.

‘Culture of impunity’

The US is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, and its military assistance has helped shape Israel’s operations in Gaza. But it has increasingly come under international pressure over its support as the war drags on.

Nine months since Hamas militants killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 250 people, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. US President Joe Biden has called for the war to end, and laid out a US-backed Israeli ceasefire proposal, but his administration has continued to supply Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons.

Paul told CNN that Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza would look far different if the US had enforced legislation known as the Leahy law. The 1997 law, named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy who authored the legislation, prohibits the US from providing assistance to any foreign security units that are credibly implicated in human rights violations.

“Had the US used the leverage that Leahy laws provide over the years to encourage the IDF to crack down on misbehavior and to snuff out its current culture of impunity, we would have seen at the very least a much stronger unit discipline (than what we see in Gaza right now) at a tactical level,” said Paul, who was a member of the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum – created in 2020 to identify Israeli units that should be barred from receiving US aid.

Under the Leahy law, in cases where an entire unit is designated to receive assistance, the State Department vets not only the unit but also its commander.

Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, and also a former member of the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, said that the panel pays “special attention” to commanders. “They set the tone for the units. When a commander from a tainted unit goes on to another unit, he can render the new unit ineligible for US assistance too,” said Blaha, who retired from the State Department last year.

‘Moral failure’

The Netzah Yehuda battalion was created by the Israeli military in 1999 for ultra-Orthodox Jews, to accommodate their more stringent religious practices, like the separation of men and women. Since it was established, the battalion has also attracted religious nationalists from the West Bank settler movement, according to those familiar with the unit. It forms part of the Kfir Brigade, the largest infantry brigade in the IDF.

One of the most shocking and widely reported incidents involving the Netzah Yehuda battalion was the death of a 78-year-old Palestinian-American man, who was detained in his home village of Jiljilya in the occupied West Bank in January 2022. Omar Assad was held gagged and with his hands tied for a period before being freed and left unresponsive by soldiers from the unit, according to an IDF investigation. An autopsy report determined that Assad had died from a heart attack after he was detained.

The IDF investigation concluded that the incident resulted from “a moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers.” Following the initial probe, the IDF said that it would reprimand the commander of Netzah Yehuda – Lt. Col. Mati Shevach – and remove the platoon commander and company commander from their positions, barring them from commanding roles for two years. But no criminal charges were brought against the soldiers, because the military said there was no causal link found between Assad’s death and their conduct. The IDF referred CNN to its findings when questioned about Assad’s death.

Current and former US officials told CNN that the Assad case reflects a broader trend of the types of cases that the US examines. To date, the only incidents in which the US has implicated Israeli units in gross human rights violations were cases in which Israeli courts had already ruled. “The State Department has never made an independent determination of a gross violation of human rights by an Israeli unit. Ever,” Blaha said.

Speaking further about the special treatment that Israel gets from the US, he added: “Of course, we treat Israel differently and that really undermines our human rights advocacy in the rest of the world.”

Shevach, Netzah Yehuda’s commander at the time of Assad’s death, was promoted to the role of deputy commander of the Kfir Brigade, which oversees Netzah Yehuda, soon after his two-year stint in charge of the ultra-Orthodox battalion ended in August 2022. And now, Shevach is training soldiers who are about to enter combat, according to an IDF press release and media reports.

Shevach has been running drills for Israeli forces at the military’s Urban Warfare Training Center, a mock city in Tze’elim military base in the Negev desert, preparing them to go into Gaza. In an October interview with US broadcaster CBS at the center, Shevach explained how he was readying soldiers to fight Hamas, adding that “the major concern for most of the soldiers” was that at a certain point they would get “an order that the war ends, and we didn’t finish our mission.”

CNN put its findings on Shevach’s career trajectory to Blaha, who said that it “strongly suggests that the types of tactics, the types of abuses, the type of violations that the Netzah Yehuda have committed are going to metastasize to the new units because if that person is in charge of training, he is going to promulgate the same lack of ethos regarding human rights.”

CNN found that two other commanders who oversaw Netzah Yehuda – also known as the 97th Battalion of the Kfir Infantry Brigade – at the time of alleged abuses in the occupied West Bank were also promoted.

Lt. Col. Nitai Okashi oversaw the Netzah Yehuda battalion from 2018 to 2020. In January 2019, soldiers from his unit were captured on video beating and taunting a Palestinian father and son after their arrest in the occupied West Bank. Four were later convicted of aggravated abuse. Okashi, according to Israeli media reports, asked the judge for mercy, saying the soldiers had learned their lesson. In another incident, in October 2019, 14 soldiers from his unit were arrested, according to the Israeli military, after they were caught on video assaulting Bedouin men at a gas station in the West Bank.

Since leaving the battalion, Okashi has been promoted into a number of commanding roles in the IDF. He has operated in Gaza since the beginning of the war as the commander of the Jerusalem Brigade and taken reporters from international media, such as German magazine Der Spiegel and Britain’s Guardian newspaper on military embeds into the strip. The IDF announced a further promotion for Okashi in March. 

Lt. Col. Uri Levy was in charge of Netzah Yehuda from 2014 to 2016. During that time, a Netzah Yehuda soldier was indicted for abuse under aggravated circumstances by a military court in Israel, after he allegedly administered electric shocks to Palestinian suspects in two separate incidents in October 2015. After leaving the unit, Levy was promoted to work in the Kfir Brigade.

Levy retired from the military in 2023 and now regularly appears on Israeli talk shows as a pundit. In April, when news broke that the US could be poised to sanction Netzah Yehuda, he told Israeli Channel 7: “Anyone looking to find some kind of flaw in an IDF unit like this can find it, and I suggest looking at the glass half full … the operational successes, the achievements, the hard work night after night.”

CNN reached out to the IDF for comment on the alleged abuses carried out by Netzah Yehuda over the past decade. In response, the IDF said: “It should be noted that in relation to the events that took place in 2015 and 2019 … the involved had been indicted and the military court had imposed prison sentences in both cases, along with additional punishments.”

Men forced to strip naked

In late 2022, Netzah Yehuda, which had been stationed in the occupied West Bank since its inception, was reassigned to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. The IDF said it was an extended operational deployment, but Blinken, in his letter to Speaker Johnson, wrote that it was an acknowledgement that the battalion had “engaged in conduct inconsistent with IDF rules.” Still, that track record has not stopped the IDF from deploying Netzah Yehuda soldiers to Gaza, where they have been fighting since the start of the war.

On April 16, under the leadership of then-commander Lt. Col. Shlomo Shiran, Netzah Yehuda was involved in an operation at the Mahdiyya Al-Shawwa school in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering, according to eyewitnesses, local journalists and IDF statements. Eyewitnesses said that the soldiers surrounded the school, “fired excessively” on the complex and forced men to strip naked before detaining them. The IDF said intelligence indicated Hamas fighters were in the area.

A voice note allegedly recorded by Palestinians inside the school as the attack unfolded, obtained by CNN, captured panic as the civilians remained trapped inside and gunshots rang out. A video posted on social media showed a Palestinian man forced to strip naked in front of an IDF tank. The IDF did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the incident.

In turning a blind eye and failing to take action against Netzah Yehuda and other units in the past, Paul said that the US has contributed to a continuing culture of impunity whose “effects we see in every outrageous TikTok video recorded and published by Israeli soldiers on the ground as they plunder, pillage, and mock their way across Gaza.”

That Netzah Yehuda has been allowed to fight in Gaza after having been pulled from the occupied West Bank in the wake of violent incidents is “ironic” and concerning, the whistleblower who served in the Netzah Yehuda told CNN. In the strip, he said: “They pretty much get a carte blanche, where they can do more or less whatever they want.”

In the rare interview, he told CNN that he has felt compelled to speak out about the mistreatment of Palestinians by the force after reflecting on his time as a soldier.

After he joined the unit at age 19, he recalled, he heard about soldiers being rewarded for killings. “If you kill a terrorist, you get two weeks off as a compensation … which is quite an attractive reward for someone that’s spending a lot of time in the military,” he said.

The IDF said in a statement to CNN that the claim soldiers are rewarded with early leave for killing terrorists was “false and baseless.”

“Soldiers are going to do what their commander is expecting them to do and follow orders. And so, if these commanders don’t put their foot down and punish them for their behavior, then they are in fact condoning their behavior,” the whistleblower said.

But, he added, “Most of the commanders couldn’t care less (about abuses), as long as it didn’t end up on video.”

Credits

Investigative Reporter: Katie Polglase
Investigative Producer & Writer: Pallabi Munsi
Investigative Producer: Benjamin Brown
Executive Producer: Barbara Arvanitidis
Senior Photojournalist: Alex Platt
Investigative Video Editor: Mark Baron
Senior Digital Video Producer: Augusta Anthony
Visual Editor: Alberto Mier
Photo Editor: Toby Hancock
OSINT Editor: Gianluca Mezzofiore
Features Editor: Laura Smith-Spark
Senior Investigations Editor: Eliza Mackintosh
Executive Editors: Dan Wright & Matt Wells

Ami Kaufman and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.

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