Eighty-eight Democratic lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden to impose sanctions on Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, hoping to leverage the period before the presidential transition.
Seventeen Democratic senators and 71 members of the House of Representatives signed the letter, which was sent at the end of October, just before Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election. The letter was publicly released on Thursday, aiming to pressure President Biden to act against these Israeli ministers during the final months of his administration.
In their appeal, the lawmakers allege that the two Israeli officials play “critical roles in driving policies that promote settler violence, weaken the Palestinian Authority, facilitate de facto and de jure annexation, and destabilize the West Bank.”
They also called for sanctions on several right-wing Israeli groups, accusing them of encouraging “settler violence.”
The letter further claims that “violent settlers” encouraged by the ministers’ “inflammatory rhetoric and incitement” and backed by these organizations were responsible for “over 1,270 recorded attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, averaging more than three violent attacks per day.”
One of the primary signatories, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), commented to CNN: “We see President-elect Trump’s nominations, and we think it’s more important than ever that President Biden right now states that the United States is not going to be a rubber stamp to the Netanyahu government’s extreme actions on the West Bank.”
{Matzav.com}