The administration of US President Joe Biden has issued a new round of sanctions against groups and individuals involved in Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, as the United States continues to unwaveringly support Israel’s war on Gaza.
The US sanctions announced on Monday are aimed at residential developer Amana, and its subsidiary Binyanei Bar Amana Ltd.
Amana is “an integral part of Israel’s extremist settlement movement” and supports settlements and farms in the West Bank “where settlers commit violence”, the US Treasury Department said.
At the same time, the US State Department also sanctioned three individuals and a third organization “for their roles in violence against civilians or in the destruction or confiscation of property” in the West Bank.
They include Shabtai Koshlevsky, vice president and founder of Hashomer Yosh, an Israeli group that is already under US sanctions, and Zohar Sabah, who the State Department said was “involved in threats and acts of violence against the Palestinian people, including in their homes”.
Sabah was also involved in an attack on Palestinian students and teachers at the Arab al-Kaabneh Primary School near Jericho in September, the ministry said.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken “repeatedly stressed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel must do more to stop the violence against people living in the West Bank and hold those responsible accountable”.
“However, as we have made it clear again, since there are no such actions by the Israeli government, we will continue to take our own steps to hold those responsible for the violence accountable,” Miller told reporters on Monday afternoon.
He added that the Biden administration has sanctioned 33 individuals and organizations in the past 10 months.
The fines come amid an outbreak of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank hit by Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 43,900 Palestinians in the area bombed since October 2023.
Although rights groups have called on Biden to punish Israeli settlement organizations for attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, many have reiterated that the barriers do not go far enough because the settlements are supported by the Israeli government itself.
Last week, dozens of US lawmakers urged the Biden administration to punish members of the Israeli government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, for their role in the violence.
“As hardline officials in the Netanyahu government continue to condone civilian violence and enact repressive policies, it is clear that additional sanctions are urgently needed,” they wrote in a letter to Biden.
“Key individuals and organizations that destabilize the West Bank – thereby threatening the security of Israel and the wider region, as well as the national security of the US – must be held accountable.”
The US provides Israel with at least $3.8bn in military aid a year, and the Biden administration has approved $14bn in aid to its ally since the Israeli army began its war on the Gaza Strip.
I urge President Biden to punish the senior members of the Netanyahu government responsible for the unacceptable escalation of violence against Palestinian settlers, settlement expansion and economic devastation in the West Bank. pic.twitter.com/ZL7kabOaMb
– Rep. Sean Casten (@RepCasten) November 18, 2024
Monday’s sanctions, which freeze the targeted groups’ and individuals’ assets in the US and bar American citizens from doing business with them, come in the final weeks of Biden’s tenure in the White House.
US President-elect Donald Trump – who will take office in January – has already signaled that he may take a more permissive approach to Israeli settlements, leading observers to believe he could lift the Biden sanctions.
When Trump took the first term as US president in 2017-2021, his administration returned to the long-standing American position that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal. Biden later backtracked.
The Republican president-elect also recently selected former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee – a Christian evangelical who once said “there is no such thing as the West Bank” – as the US ambassador to Israel.
“It’s Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee said in 2017, referring to the biblical name for the area often used by Israel’s distant officials and settlers.
“There is no such thing as resolution. They are communities, they are neighborhoods, they are cities. There is no job called a job,” he said.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked American-Israeli Yechiel Leiter – another staunch supporter of the settlements – to be Israel’s ambassador to the US when Trump takes office.
The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Leiter was a member of the hardline ultranationalist Jewish Defense League, which has been linked to violent attacks on US soil and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Leiter’s appointment is “an indication of where Netanyahu is going” as Trump moves into the White House, Michael Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine research at the think tank Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Al Jazeera last week.
“We will see more of these signs,” he added. “The goal is to just go further than they did in Trump’s first term.”
